Economic Rights

The notion of economic rights has always been a precarious proposition. At one time they belonged only to the crown and the landed aristocracy. Then they were given to the capitalists who owned private property. Those rights have remained rock solid since their first invention. Later, the idea was floated that economic rights were universal. Everybody should have decent housing, food, health care, education, and the right to have one's labor rewarded with a living wage and considered an asset as valuable as the private property of the richest capitalists.

Ideas go about their work of persuading. Crisis and disaster are also the mother invention and recognition. The Great Depression brought about the immediacy of recognizing the economic rights of all citizens. The predictions of marxian theory had come close to the reality. The pure liberal capitalist system was rescued by economic thinkers such as Keynes and political leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt neither of whom were marxists by any stretch of the imagination. I have always found the reviling of Keynes and Roosevelt by the liberal capitalist thinkers as rather odd. Why do they want to shoot the guys who saved the system they adore?

This is the age of erosion of economic rights for the impoverished and the worker whose labor is her only economic asset. The economic statistics show it and the laws passed during the last 25 years explain it.

Things were going better for a larger segment of the population when economic rights were considered under their broader definition. How bad things will need to get before the idea comes under consideration again?

What will it take to guarantee economic rights? What methods will be required to accomplish it? Just voting rights in or out depending on the current crisis does not seem to be working.