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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Your last two sentences couldn't be any more eloquent.

When reasoning on these issues, one should always carefully examine the phrase: "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Every single word is chosen very carefully.

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And every single one could be interpreted either in favor of or against universal basic income. So what?

A basic right is something you inherently have, and cannot be taken away. It's not something to be provided by the government. I wish more people had a better understanding of this.

A reasonable expectation is something that should be provided by others in a society to those that need them and is the glue that holds that society together. I wish more people had a better understanding of this.

Edit: for example, if someone is in a severe accident and unable to help themselves, it is a reasonable expectation in a functioning society that a passerby might call for help or help directly.

This treats rights (legal) as though they were laws of nature. I have yet to see convincing data or argument supporting this notion.

There is ample evidence from history that the legal construct called "rights" is in fact not absolute at all. In fact, all the data we have suggest that "rights" are in fact provided by the government. The mechanisms differ (e.g. the US's constitutional republic encodes government-defined rights in the Constitution and laws derived from it), but ultimately "rights" are something that people, in the forming of the government they live under, agree should exist.

The US constitution recognizes rights that are inherent to people and enumerates them in the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights does not grant the rights within it, it merely recognizes them. Theoretically, the government has no authority to infringe on these rights. Obviously, in practice this is different.

There is no such accepted definition of "basic right".

Early modern British/early American discourse makes a lot of the idea of "natural rights," which were held to be rights men had that weren't necessarily enumerated in the law. Perhaps that's what the OP means to get at (although the idea that "nobody can take it away from you" is just a definition of the concept of a right, not some innate difference between positive and negative liberties).

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