>People don’t like being told they can’t drive wherever they want, but Lores says that while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges.
Modern discourse about "rights" has become twisted. Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition. A society needs to choose its rights wisely lest the unintended consequences result in less overall freedom.
In a healthy civil society legally enshrined rights are less important because you can trust that everybody's freedom will be maximized, at least to a first-order approximation. In unhealthy societies legal rights are often cold comfort.
IMO as we accumulated more and more "rights", the concept became diluted. We went from the bedrock negative rights of freedom of speech, travel, etc, then to positive rights, and then people started applying the concept of "rights" to what I would consider "entitlements".
It's all the same debate, really. After all is said and done, rights function to entitle you to things or acts. The blurry line that I believe you might be talking about has a very specific name, but recent social and public discourse make a lot of people nowadays automatically cringe at it's sight (wrongly, IMO) without seriously hearing out or considering it's merits. I'm talking about the word "privilege".
>Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition.
I take slight issue with that - for example, what prohibition on males was there when women were given the right to vote? I suppose one could argue the male vote was diluted but realistically no pain would be felt.
I say this because oftentimes for social services arguments, conservatives will ask me "well who's gonna pay for it," which I can often answer with "literally nobody. You are generating property value for yourself by housing homeless / increasing the value of your currency by educating disenfranchised youth / whatever."
Granting the right to private property ultimately deprives people of access to necessary resources. Private property is what forces people to have to pay ever-increasing rent, or work more hours for less pay. It's an inherently unstable social system because those with more property can more easily increase their ownership and thereby make it harder for those with no property from ever getting any.
> Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition.
In college a professor told us "You can't grant a right without taking one away." In recent decades, the US trend seems to have been toward more individual rights and fewer community/state rights.
Indeed and I think a further manifestation of this "privilege" is the constant honking of the horn by drivers at the slightest reduction in their speed or movement.
Not only do they want to drive wherever they want but they seem to feel entitled to take out their frustration on anyone they want. The noise pollution that invariably accompanies traffic seems to really only penalize pedestrians, the very people who aren't contributing to the traffic problems.
This strikes me as the fundamental issue.