During the nineteen eighties, at the height of urban redevelopment (at least in the South--the North had it's boom earlier), I eventually got clued into the fact that the enthusiasm for cost/benefit analysis, which was supposed to make it possible to separate "good" projects from "losers" ahead of time, was not as objectively motivated as it seemed. Because, while one might assume from the pairing, which had been transitioned from traditonal business accounting practices and was part of the program to "make government more like a business," that the entity bearing the costs and enjoying the benefits would be the same, closer analysis of the projections revealed that was not the case. Urban redevelopment routinely relied on long-time residents and owners of marginal property bearing the cost (in time, energy and disruption) of relocating so the development community could enjoy the benefit of acquiring real estate on the cheap and, if they were really lucky, pocket a subsidy to boot.

So, in retrospect, urban renewal or redevelopment was part of a long history of transferring public assets into the private pockets of the already wealthy and privileged. The creation of a small class of wealthy people was not a happenstance.

But, my point today is to focus on the relationship between entities to whom costs and benefits were/are ascribed. Ideally, when these categories are reviewed to assess an enterprise as to success and failure, the entity incurring the costs and benefits is one and the same. Moreover, familiarity with this model might lead on to conclude that other relationships, such as between rights and obligations, are similar. Indeed, that's the perspective Justice Clarence Thomas brings to the discussion when he opines that people have been too insistent on their rights without attending to the obligations on which those rights are based.

Of course, that's where Thomas goes wrong. Human rights aren't based on obligations being satisfied, such as the dictum "freedom is obedience to the law" implies. Human rights are natural--i.e. they come with being human; much as a bird by nature has a right to fly. Human rights do not have to be earned. Neither do civil rights, for that matter, as long as a person is born in the right place.

Civil rights are also different in that they're really not rights at all. Citizenship implies a number of obligations to participate in the running of society--i.e. governing. But, because the Constitution is predicated on individual liberty, the obligations of citizenship are not required to be carried out. The framework laid out in the Constitution assumes sufficient success to enable society to accommodate a considerable number of free-loaders, the occasion of Clarence Thomas' complaint. Indeed, the system of representation, which relies on individual citizens taking turns so none are too severely taxed with the responsibilities of running the nation, is formalized and regularized by hiring a cadre of individuals to carry out tasks that are either onerous or too sporadic in nature to make wholesale attention efficient (think responding to fire and flood).

Which brings me to the point of concluding that our human rights depend on obligations being carried out by someone else--i.e. where the entity concerned in cost/benefit is ideally the same, the entities concerned in rights and obligations are different. As the Bill of Rights lays out, but indirectly, by reference to expected results (respect for and a guarantee they remain inviolate) in the title, rather than what's actually enumerated--the dos and don'ts of the agents of government. That the Bill of Rights is a list of "thou shalt nots" continues to be largely ignored, probably because until rather recently there weren't any mechanisms to make those prohibitions stick. The Founding Fathers were keenly aware that those empowered to use physical force needed to be strictly limited. But, the only enforcement mechanism they set up are the checks and balances the tri-partite system is presumed to exert rather automatically. That each part might have a greater interest in its own power than in challenging the others seems not to have occurred. And, that the people have the power was practically meaningless as long the people had no access to the corridors of power and the records being faithfully, or not so faithfully, kept by the cadre of permanent bureaucrats--another potential center of self-interested power.

The power of the people is, like their human rights, worthless if the obligations of our delegates are not discharged and those who fail to meet their obligations aren't timely discharged in turn. We hire people to provide public service; if they don't perform as expected, they need to be fired. That's a citizen obligation (Justice Kennedy refers to it in terms of "enforcing the rule of law"), but I suspect that's not the context Justice Thomas perceives. Thomas is an authoritarian and convinced that individual rights, other than the right to exist, have to be earned by being subservient to the rule of law--not surprising since that's how he perceives himself to have reached the pinnacle of society. I'm not sure he's even aware that in assuming the position on the Court, he's taken on obligations about which it's rather unseemly for him to be complaining.

But then, complaints seem to have become rather common for our public servants. Perhaps because "service" has taken on a bad oder, now that "community service" has been redefined as the first level of punishment for crime. Or, perhaps, the tradition of involuntary servitude has a lingering influence in the American mind. Actually, more than that when one considers that's what's been imposed on our "stop-loss" troops. A military made up of slaves? That does not bode well.

Anyway, whether relationships between two entities (cost/benefit, rights/obligations) are direct or indirect strikes me as significant. It's possible that our system of laws works best when it follows the former, rather than, as, for example, the campaign finance legislation does, try to influence the behavior of one entity (candidates for public office) by regulating another (voters/donors).

Why is it that obligations are virtually ignored in most policy discussions? Why is the fact that a domestic partnership/marriage is a voluntary assumption by individuals of additional obligations for someone other than themselves discounted in favor of opposition that's based on the possible effect on someone who's not even involved? Why would we opposed people assuming additional obligations and doing so voluntarily? Is it simply because it shows the independence-driven as selfish? Or is it because the selfish don't appreciate that their free-loading is built into the system?
Would it help to explain that their free-loading is off-set by the money they are taxed--not entirely, but substantially?

I used to consider the anti-tax crowd as anti-socials. Now, I realize they're just free-loaders, easily supportable, as long as we don't let them rip us off.