Among the innumerable new human rights being claimed almost daily, one is conspicuously missing: the right not to be bothered by idiotic rights-ism.

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William Watson: How about enforcing 'Get your tent off my property'? Back to video

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No, you do not have a basic human right to work at home three days a week if you’re a federal civil servant (or anyone else). You also don’t have a basic human right to be a federal civil servant.

Employment 101: the employer gives you money and any other benefits the two of you agree on in exchange for work you do. What the work is and how it’s done are up to the employer. If you don’t like the conditions and compensation stipulated, you’re free to seek work elsewhere — or, increasingly, take advantage of the default incomes provided by our various governments, singly and in combination. In a society growing bigger and more complex every day, opportunities for alternative employment continue to multiply.

If your employer is so unwise as to give you a say over what work you do and how you do it, you can certainly hold them to that. But an employer shouldn’t have to explain to a judge or labour tribunal why he has decided to structure the work of the organization this way or that. It’s the employer’s prerogative to decide what’s best for the organization without second guessing by jurists or social scientists. (Not to mention, in this case, that there simply aren’t any studies showing how more than two days a week in the office is best for networking, morale and productivity in all organizations. How many affluent societies have experienced a permanent two-day week?)

If the federal government has already negotiated away lots of its rights and prerogatives as an employer, well, more shame on us voters for having organized so much of our social activity using an institution in which, without consequence to themselves, well-meaning but dunderheaded negotiators distribute largesse from taxpayers to federal workers.

The same principles apply to protest camping. You do not have a basic human right to pitch a tent and set up camp wherever you please — not even if you really are registered in courses at the university where you decide to trespass. Universities have every right to determine how their property is used. It’s their property. Whether you can camp on it or not is up to them.

Even if what we’re talking about is property owned by the public, there are rules for how it is to be used. And there need to be rules, the “tragedy of the commons” by now being well understood. (The tragedy of the House of Commons is a different and more difficult problem.) What no one owns deteriorates. If the appropriate authorities decide to allow camping on public property, fine. But other would-be users of the space will adjust their behaviour accordingly and the long-run consequences may be dire (e.g., Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which featured, not in a flattering way, in Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s Americas column in the Wall Street Journal last week.)

The president of McGill University, where protesters have been encamped for three weeks now, has written a nice, reasonable letter explaining why McGill wants police to shut down the encampment. The first reason he cites is “safety, security and public health.” The Montreal fire department has not been able “to go into the area to verify compliance with health and safety.” It seems “the people inside the encampment have no escape routes in case of fire.” There’s only “one point to enter or exit the encampment,” which itself blocks an emergency exit from the library it abuts.

That’s a bit of a joke, isn’t it? We want to stop the camping because we’re worried the poor dears (rape- and murder-sympathizers that many of them are) might hurt themselves because they won’t let us come in and calculate the tent-to-smoke-alarm ratio?

President Deep Saini does eventually get to the question of property: “the university remains private property.” The encampment “monopolizes university property, preventing the McGill community from using that space for their normal activities,” including celebrating convocation, which in recent years has been done in a (very large) tent on the encampment site.

But that way of posing the problem invites a judge to balance the benefits to the people in the encampment against the benefits to those who would eat lunch, play house league rugby and soccer, and convocate on the Lower Campus, as it’s known.

Property is theft is the operating assumption behind this kind of balancing: property-owners must justify their alleged theft case by case, showing the social benefits are greater than the social costs.

In fact, property is a gift. Our social system based on property rights has produced wealth and ease far beyond the imagination of people living even just a century ago. It should not be necessary for property-owners to explain to every justice of the peace how their each and every use of their own property creates more benefits than costs. We know beyond possible doubt that the property system as a whole does. Requiring litigation of every assertion of property rights is a prescription for dissipating the large surplus the system has generated. The right that needs enforcing is the right to insist “Get off my property!”

Financial Post

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