In December 2017, Philip Alston, an Australian human rights lawyer and the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights for the United Nations, was commissioned by the UN to take a fact-finding tour of the United States. The purpose of his trip was to determine whether "the persistence of extreme poverty in America undermines the enjoyment of human rights by its citizens." After a two-week tour that took him through California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico, West Virginia, and Washington, DC, Alston described what he observed: "I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage filled yards in states where governments don't consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction, and I met with people in the South of Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them bringing illness, disability and death." By almost any economic measure, the United States of America is one of the richest nations ever to exist. At the same time, 65 million of its people live near or below the poverty line, struggling to feed, house, and care for themselves on a day-to-day basis. As Alston interviewed the scores of homeless occupying LA's Skid Row, he was told repeatedly that theirs is a great country: "American exceptionalism was a constant theme in my conversations." In Alston's summarizing report, he questioned whether this was still the case: "Instead of realizing its founders' admirable commitments, today's United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights. As a result, contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound." Alston also noted that despite its ready "naming and shaming" of other countries that are human rights violators, as well as its ratification of treaties in which human rights to sustenance and shelter are enumerated, the United States does not itself treat such economic and social conditions as rights for its citizens. Rather, the US government remains focused on defending so-called negative rights--freedoms from interventions or suppressions that could induce intimidation, coercion, or even violence. The causes for this tendency are many, but one is historical. There are no more influential or important documents in the history of negative freedoms than the US Declaration of Independence and the first ten amendments of the US Constitution that followed, otherwise known as the Bill of Rights. When Americans wish to expand the list of places where they might carry a firearm, or marry a partner whom they aren't legally at liberty to marry, or erect a statue of the Ten Commandments on public property, or terminate a pregnancy, these are the texts they either appeal to or cite. For Americans, the invocation of freedom, liberty, or rights is typically framed in the classically negative sense of "not being interfered with by others." But as Alston's account amply demonstrates, this brand of American freedom proves insufficient when it comes to the destitute and desperate. What is the value of a constitutional prohibition on law abridging free speech to the resident of Skid Row who is without access to a toilet? What good is the right to vote to the person too sick--or lacking time off from work--to get to the polls? Even the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the first to distinguish the concept of negative freedom and a great champion of its protections, acknowledged the perversity of its bestowal on those too wretched to avail themselves of it: "To offer political rights, or safeguards against intervention by the state, to men who are half naked, illiterate, underfed, and diseased is to mock their condition." Such is the (quite literal) condition of many Americans today. And so it would seem American freedom, at least in its hegemonic form, needs a rethink. In what follows, I offer a comprehensive prescription that aims to address the problem of persistent economic insecurity in America, one based on an expanded notion of American freedom and grounded in an alternative model of economic thought. The United States can eradicate poverty and build an economy that works for everyone--that puts, as the mantra goes, people over profits--by adopting social and economic ("positive") rights: the right to a well-paying job, the right to health care, the right to an education, the right to a home, and more. Excerpted from The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights by Mark Paul All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
