What are the orgins of Human Rights?

 

               We should doubt the theology espoused by Thomas Jefferson. In the US Declaration of Independence, he wrote, “…all…are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We can be critical of this assertion that rights are a gift of the Creator.  

               God was not handing out such gifts, not before or after Yosef was first interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh, and especially not as Egypt brought nation after nation into slavery. God did not hand out such gifts as Moses led the Israelites out of bondage. The people of Jesus’ time knew little of the freedom of self expression, nor of freedom from fear and want. God did not hand out such gifts during the life time of Mohammad. Nor when 95 theses were nailed to a monastery door. Over all the ages, God has been a constant and has not changed. We need not believe Jefferson who, during the era of the Enlightenment, thought that human rights appeared from the hand of a changed God.  

               And why would we reduce human rights to the status of mere gifts?? All of us have been through the practices of gift giving. When the wrapped package first appears, the recipient acts humble and shows some level of disbelief. The pretty wrapping is dispensed with and the shock and wonderful excitement and gratitude are expressed. Finally, the gift is laid aside, to be put away later on. When the gift is brought back out, the occasion is a special time, not “every day,” and the giver is praised again for the gift. We should not be treating human rights like we treat physical gifts we have received! Human rights are to be part of everyday life, are to be recognized with us at all times, they are something more than a gift.  

               Around December of 1948, speaking about the adoption of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, a member of the Declaration’s drafting sub-Committee, wrote: “…a consensus had been reached as to the supreme value of the human person, a value that did not originate in the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the fact of existing—which gave rise to the inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and to fully develop one’s personality.”  

               From Santa Cruz’s grasp of the matter, rights come into existence simply when a person exists. Are human rights actually provided to every human?? Are human rights hanging in the air at all times, around every human? Let us ask the people of Myanmar in the year 2023. Or ask the people of Russia as they are expected to serve a war that does not benefit but a few Russians. Or check in with those fleeing violence and desperate want in Central American countries as they begin the arduous and unpredictable immigration to the north. Or look to those people living through the strife of Sudan and Ethiopia. Do any of those people see human rights hanging in the air to be enjoyed simply because they are human? Or has God forsaken those people, this omnipresent and omnipotent Creator??

               As gifts or as flowing from the very existence of humans, these both appear to fall short in the role of giving us an origin of human rights, and begs the question, “If we can not be sure of their origins, how can we be secure in protecting and advancing human rights?” 

               From the history of the British Isles, I want to recall the importance of the Magna Carta. This is the start of "a worldly power" that eventually led to human rights. In effect, the Magna Carta was an effort by the noble families to pressure the British King to treat them with civility. Those noble families had suffered from whimsical and indifferent decisions from the King. In their Magna Carta, they demanded that the King stop mistreating them in that way. They were calling for a civil society between the royal family and all their noble families. In the course of their history, the House of Lords was created, in effect expanding the civil society on that exclusive level of community between ruler and nobles. Later a House of Commons was created, giving law-making abilities to a Parliament in British history, again advancing a civil society to even more of that island's population.  

               When Jefferson and his committee drafted the US Declaration of Independence, their demands were actually the result of more than 12 years of efforts to have the mother country in the British Isles treat the colonists better, to treat them in a more civil manner. Since the King and the Parliament were unwilling to heed those requests, the representatives of 13 colonies declared their separation from the colonial power, so they could explore self-governance and the creation of their own civil society.  

               Along with advancing the ideals of what a civil society could be, in each of these historic cases (Magna Carta, Parliament, US Declaration of Independence, UN Universals Declaration), those who demanded to be treated with civility also accepted some growing responsibilities. The responsibilities could be described along different dimensions. Through the Magna Carta, all those noble families promised each other that they would not abandon the principles they had set forth there. If some families had relinquished responsibilities, then the monarch might have moved back to their previous mistreatment of them all. By forming a Parliament, the Lords and the Commons agreed to rules of decorum and how they would stand behind the decisions they agreed to as a body. Building on independent decision making, the United States formed a brand new country that became a model for governments around the world, governments that wanted to aspire to self-governance and overthrow dictators and authoritarian forms of government. By taking up these never-ending responsibilities, those who were experimenting with self-governance, were exercising their civil liberties.  

               The existence of a civil society and the ongoing exercise of civil liberties then appear to be the source of human rights. Nations and other regions of people who cannot depend upon civil society, most probably will not find human rights, nor can they predict when their rights will be reliable. Plus, if no-one is free to exercise their civil liberties, and take responsibility for maintaining the civil society, they too might question how solidified their human rights are.  

               Meanwhile, if a civil society is strong, is reliably based on the institutions within it, and if people do routinely and intentionally exercise their civil liberties (unlike gifts you only bring out for special occasions), then the human rights can be offered to even those who can not exercise their civil liberties: infants, those with severe disabilities, new immigrants, people punished by living in cages, etc. 

               From this understanding of human rights, we need to concentrate our self-governing efforts on strengthening and maintaining our civil societies, and we need to recognize the importance of exercising civil liberties and responsibilities. 

Morality not Economics determines when exploitation happens

 

In the science of Economics, is there any way to measure the difference between take-advantage and exploitation, a demarcation between the two, a way of knowing when take-advantage turns into exploitation? I have never seen the articles that mark where the difference is. Yet we know that exploitation goes on in the economy. How do we know when it happens?

We can define take-advantage. The entire market economy works on a basis of take-advantage. When I go to the grocery, I could buy all the ingredients to bake my own loaves of bread. Those loaves would probably cost me $5 each, with my own efforts, my own kitchen, my own dishes to be washed, etc. They would never be as consistently sliced and good as those available from the grocery bakery aisle. The grocery sells loaves of bread for $3.50 each. So I take advantage of the grocery every time I buy a loaf a bread. The loaf of bread that is worth $5 to me sells for so much less than that. 

In that same transaction, the grocery takes advantage of me, the customer, and in a sense every customer. The grocery buys loaves of bread from a bakery, possibly at $2.50 per loaf. So the grocery is making a dollar of revenue greater than the cost of the loaf of bread. This is not profit, just revenue over cost. The grocery still needs to pay for rent, equipment upkeep, employees and their benefits, utilities, and more to keep the business going. Eventually, when all the sales of a week or year are measured against all the costs, the grocery does need to record a profit. If there is no profit, the grocery will go out of business.  The point is that throughout the market economy, every transaction is possible when both the buyer and seller can expect to take advantage and come away with an economic benefit. Think of it, even the bakery takes advantage of every grocery because the loaves of bread they sell might cost them $1.50 each to produce.

Even with employment, the market economy works because both employers and employees take advantage of each other, otherwise the relationships would not be formed. The employees provide their labor, skills, connections, loyalty and so many other possible qualities while creating value for their employers. They receive pay, but pay that is less valuable than what the employer measures as each employee creates. 

for each employee:
paycheck < value created

For the employers, each employee needs to create enough value to justify the paychecks they receive. In fact, if an employer sees that an employee is not pulling ones weight, not creating enough value, then the employer could be expected to fire that employee. An employer can not expect to lose money from an employee not contributing enough, not creating enough value for the business' success.

If the economy were that simple, based only on take-advantage transactions, then we would not expect to ever have recessions or busts or contagion bank failures? Exploitation happens when a person takes home pay excessively greater than the value one creates for their employer without any consequence for that exploitation. The results from systems of exploitation are those economic failures that are occurring so many times within one lifetime. Yet again, how do we measure where the line is crossed between take-advantage and exploitation? 

Exploitation happens when:
individual paycheck >>> value created

There are extreme cases we could identify as exploitation. If those examples can lead science and society to identify the systems of exploitation then ways could be found to possibly reduce the number of economic disasters, or they could be less severe, or . . . how much better? 

Here is an example. When all the parts are gathered at the start of a truck assembly line, there are fantastic amounts of value in the parts themselves. All the metallic alloys, all the tinted, tempered glass, the wiring and electronics, the different forms of plastic, the leather and other materials are all valuable, each on their own. Then think of the design and coordination required between all the parts, think of the engineering value to make the precision parts that integrate into so many systems in the truck. There is value in the designs, for the interior of the truck cabin, for the exterior lines and aero dynamics, for the powerful engine, for the dependability of the braking systems, etc. So many people have contributed their employment in creating value in the safety tests and in the inspections before the parts go into the assembly line. Remember too that modern truck models have variations to make them more attractive to different segments of the buying public. All of those and more considerations go into the value of the parts before the assembly begins. The assembly process itself can take as long as 25 hours for each truck, 25 hours of effort from all the diverse, coordinated and highly skilled teams, robots, automated paint sprayers, more inspectors, plus the utilities required by the assembly plant. In the end, a new pickup truck could cost as much as $50,000 to simply roll off the assembly line. (This is not a reference to the sales price, which would include transportation costs for the final product, and mark ups by the manufacturer and by the auto sales company.) The cost of producing the new pickup truck stands for all the contributions from so many sources, laborers and history, resulting in a $50,000 valuation.

What if there was a person who expected to be paid more than the value of a new pickup truck every working day of a year? Could any of those assembly team members, or anyone who sees the true value of their combined efforts in making a truck, could any such person stretch their imaginations to believe there is anywhere a person who creates more than the value of a new pickup truck, creates more than $50,000 for one’s employer and for the whole economy, every working day of the year??  The comparison is difficult to grasp. 

Could there be a situation where:
paycheck > $50,000 per day = value created by individual per day ??

Let’s be generous. Let’s imagine that a person works so hard and with such talents for 10 hours in each of 300 days a year. That would be an extraordinary, even superhuman effort! Such a person would get two weeks of vacation and only one day off each weekend, but work all the other days. That would allow for 300 days of work in a year. And if deserving of that level of pay, that person would take home more than $15 million per year. Does that level of pay then seem to fit the take-advantage level of market transactions? Or does accepting pay greater than $15 million per year sound like exploitation? Does such an paycheck mean that the individual is exploiting other employees, or exploiting earth systems, or exploiting the financial systems of banking or stock exchanges or some other community system?

In the vocabulary of some Economic theories, people may earn wages or may earn rent. In a sense, if a person invests in publicly traded stocks, and then sells the stock for a profit, those Economic theories might label those profits as rent. And if those profits are highly excessive, they would still be labeled as rent. The definitions offered by this essay are to suggest that maybe there is exploitation if pay rates and incomes for an individual actually total to more than $15 million per year. If the individual did not create value for the economy on levels in excess of $15 million per year, then that person is not participating in the economy through take-advantage transactions, but is exploiting some system or systems, and expecting other people to create enough value to allow for excessive pay rates and not allowing those who did create the value to be compensated for what they created.

If that conclusion is possible for profits from the sale of stocks, then similar arguments can be made about salaries in excess of $15 million per year, and for those who are paid by multiple companies to combine different sources of pay to exceed $15 million per year. If an executive for one corporation receives more pay by sitting on three boards for other corporations, could there be exploitation? With one set of knowledge, that person is assisting four corporations to garner value from extensive numbers of employees who are not being paid for all the value they create. Instead the value from underpaid employees is synergized and siphoned up to be paid to board members and executives and individual investors, adding to systems of exploitation.

To be more specific, John Munkirs studied and wrote about the Interlocks between Western corporations and industries that create organically operating Central Planning Mechanisms. The Interlocks result from every corporate board needing members who are aware of some facets of the suppliers and their plans, and of the customers and their plans. So customer corporations and supplier corporations offer the most strategically valuable members to have on a corporate board. Not only do those corporations have relationships with each other, their very decision models require that they interlock with each other, coordinate to ensure that each corporation around those Interlocks is succeeding. If one corporation starts to fail, it could mean an interruption in the supplies of other corporations. So if there is exploitation occurring, the Interlocks work to ensure all are creating exploitations and benefiting financially.

If some chain of morality could start to question the exploitation, then could the interlocks start a process where more and more corporations agree to work against exploitation?

An influential enough customer could possibly start this questioning of the exploitation. The governments of self-governing societies could require a cap on individual incomes from among those who sell to the governments. If defense contractors, and utilities, and state-sanctioned monopolies, and medical providers, and other industries that rely so heavily on government contracts and purchases could be brought to accept individual income caps, then their interlocks with other corporations and industries could reach some critical mass and start to undermine the systems of exploitation.

This does not suggest that corporate boards and executives give up any fiduciary responsibilities. The corporations and industries should continue to compete in the market economy and collect revenues greater than costs and demonstrate their capacity for profits at the same level as before any individual income caps. But since those corporations will not be paying their board members and executives and individual investors as much money, the corporations will have to find other uses for those funds. Simply put, those funds could be used to investigate where exploitation had been occurring, leading to stopping most forms of and systems of exploitation. Gender pay gaps could be ended. Greater safety, accident prevention and advanced training could be sought. Innovations could be developed. Those funds that use to line the pockets of top executives, or that were destined for overseas tax havens, could be repurposed as the corporations and business sense sees as profitable and beneficial to the long-term life of their companies. The emphasis would not be so heavily focused on short-term profits, but rather on long-term sustainability of the companies. Those executives who hit the income ceiling have no incentive to exploit right away in gaining another million dollars personally. They do have the incentives to ensure that for years to come they reliably reach that earnings ceiling every year. That in itself would be a systemic change to benefit individuals who are no longer in a “rat race”, benefit their peers, companies and the larger societies. Plus, we might see less volatility in the macro-economy.