More people would rather live here than anywhere “liveable.” Photo: Flickr/Martin Haesemeyer

• Why cities that people actually want to live in aren’t counted as “liveable” cities.
• Progressives are wrong, Burt Folsom explains: early Christians’ social compact was about private charity, not government redistribution.
• A neat infographic shows how long load times can drive website visitors away.
• Do sanctimonious op-eds about why atheists are better help atheists’ public image?
• How the minimum wage increases unemployment.
• Last but not least, Alex Tabarrok reports that the federal government is finally starting to sell off some of its assets. Uncle Sam owns fully 30 percent of the country’s land area.

The Washington Post reports, for example, that “gay groups and liberal legal scholars say they are prevailing” in lawsuits against private individuals and companies that do not offer services to homosexuals “because an individual’s religious views about homosexuality cannot be used to violate gays’ right to equal treatment under the law.” The article cites several businesses, including a psychologist and a photographer, that have been penalized in the courts for offering their services only to heterosexuals. And it accepts that there is a fundamental “right to be free from discrimination” that clashes with other, more traditional rights.

But what fundamental rights are harmed if a psychologist or photographer chooses one client over another–whether for religious reasons or more mundane reasons like his bottom line? Is there really a natural “right to counseling” that imposes on psychologists the obligation to take any patient? Is there really a God-given “right to have your picture taken” that imposes on photographers the obligation to snap pictures of all comers? And is there really a “right to be free from discrimination?”

There are, in fact, no such natural rights. As with any “right” that imposes an obligation on another individual, these are inventions of the state, more akin to entitlements than to anything described in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The “right to be free from discrimination” is more a social ideal, a goal for interpersonal interaction, than it is a description of a core characteristic of a human individual, like property ownership or speech. In fact, since these social “rights” impose obligations on others, they tend to infringe upon individual liberty, for instance the freedom of a service provider to specialize his practice. Far from securing “equal treatment under the law,” this tends to create special legal privileges for some and special legal obligations for others.

The psychologist and photographer in question were almost certainly in the wrong. In most cases it would be uncouth to turn away a customer simply because of an objection to his sexual preferences (or race or any other immutable characteristic), even if that objection is grounded in the sincerest religious or moral belief. But to do so is merely rude, not a violation of the customer’s fundamental rights as a human being. It is in fact a violation of the provider’s liberty for the government to enforce an invented right in the name of equality and prevention of discrimination. A better solution than turning to government would rely on two time-tested methods to set things straight: shame and the provider’s bottom line. If you don’t like how the provider runs his business and chooses his clients, you are free to criticize him and take your business elsewhere.

As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President’s Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t. Not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited – I am. I called for action because the failure to do so would have cost more jobs and caused more hardships. In fact, a failure to act would have worsened our long-term deficit by assuring weak economic growth for years. That’s why I pushed for quick action.

Lowry may be right that this is politically shrewd rhetoric, since it allows the President “to redefine extensive government activism as simple pragmatism” and potentially redefine the national debate on the size and scope of government. But this is hardly a new argument, however.

Progressives have long couched their arguments for a larger government role as pragmatic responses to the weakness of private, individual action. They do not contend that we need bigger government as such, but instead maintain that since individual action is insufficient to achieve “socialy desirable” ends,  the only viable alternative is government action. Herbert Croly, for instance, argued a century ago that the unequal distribution of wealth was “the inevitable outcome of the chaotic individualism of our political and economic organization.” And since individualism has failed, the pragmatic alternative is for the federal government to “mak[e] itself responsible for a morally and socially desirable distribution of wealth.”

This is a wholly Progressive argument, reminiscent of Croly. Even if the states have to cede authority to the federal government, the argument goes, expanding the federal welfare state is both an absolute good and the logical next step for “modern” government. To reject this enlightened policy, then, even in the name of higher ideals like individual self-worth or protection of state prerogatives, is callous and, worse, backwards.