This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 29, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Learning why we have rights is every bit as important as learning what rights are and what they're not.

Edo Senior Fellow Tom Palmer discusses rights and the trouble some people have understanding

them in his new book, Realizing Freedom.

Libertarian Theory, History and Practice, he spoke following a forum for the book held December 1st.

You are very critical of the argument that people are entitled to delivery by the state of benefits, housing, medical care, education, and other

tangible things, but you also say that a legal system ought to be based on rights. And if you believe that, why not more rights, more

extra rights, you know, right to free press, right to assemble, all that, but also these other rights.

Well this is a big theme and a lot of contemporary debates and law and political philosophy.

Goes back to T.S. Marshall, who gave a series of lectures at Cambridge University in I think 1950

in which he argued roughly as follows. First you had civil rights, right to property, right to freedom of conscience, and so on, then political rights, right to vote, and now we have civil, excuse me, social rights, rights to social benefits to be delivered by the state.

His argument was it's just the next

stage of rights. Thank you libertarians for the civil rights. Thank you

libertarians for the political rights. And now we socialists will just add

another layer.

Social rights, housing, medical care, etc.

The problem with that is that the legal system

to bring about those rights undermines the other ones at the same time.

It's not actually a rights-based legal system.

And I'll give you a simple example.

Two of the really significant and profound and very intelligent advocates of this positive rights mentality,

...