Your Freedoms Won't Survive

"We have the ability, we just lack the will." - Unknown

There is a connection between a nation's wealth and the rights and safety of its citizens. However, the common assumption that rich countries naturally protect freedoms simply does not hold up.

National wealth, measured by total GDP, is only weakly correlated with widespread well-being. What truly matters is the average wealth available per person and how that wealth is shared, which strongly links to fundamental human flourishing indicators like life expectancy and education.

My question is this: Are rights a luxury afforded by economic surplus, or are they the essential foundation for stability required to generate that surplus? I lean toward the latter.

Echoing the ideas of economists like Amartya Sen, genuine poverty, a corollary to the lack of basic human rights, is the absence of freedom to secure health or education, rather than just a lack of income. This broader perspective tells me individual rights are a function of wealth distribution. When a few hold disproportionate wealth, the entire social and political system becomes dangerously unstable.

“The notion of human right builds on our shared humanity. These rights are not derived from the citizenship of any country, or the membership of any nation, but are presumed to be claims or entitlements of every human being. They differ, therefore, from constitutionally created rights guaranteed for specific people.”
― Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice

In fact, many argue that extreme economic inequality is the single greatest structural threat to liberal democracy. When wealth concentrates, it translates directly into concentrated political power. True democracy, where the rule of law and the rights of minorities are secure, requires fairness. When inequality spikes, elites resist funding public goods and supporting social programs. Often, with the assistance of tightly-controlled media, elites deflect blame and set the sights of the disenfranchised majority against vulnerable minorities.

This is how we lose core liberties like free speech and equal standing, impacting everything from the fight for gay marriage rights to basic woman's equality in the workplace. History proves that when the economy is broadly equitable, that stability actually enables the expansion of social and civil rights. 

Equitable = fair = human rights. While this relationship is intuitive, today’s extreme wealth inequality, which will be exacerbated by ongoing economic decline, is an alarm that individual rights are under extreme threat. Expect more hate and violence against dark people, women, and other vulnerable groups.

When wealth is under threat, those in power tend to retreat from social fairness. However, I argue that aggregate wealth is partly attributed to equality. Strong institutions that respect human rights are a precondition for generating sustainable wealth. Without reliable courts, social safety nets, purposeful human rights laws and secure property rights, individual rights will erode.

In other words, aggregate societal wealth alone does not guarantee individual rights. Said differently, a society can theoretically support human rights during periods of economic decline, as long as the institutions are in place.

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case because a shrinking pie leads to more competitive behavior as wealth creation becomes a zero sum game. Social rights are the most fragile in a crisis because they depend on consistent government spending. Their survival depends entirely on institutional structure. Programs set up as fixed budgets can fail during a recession when demand for the service and deficit funding peaks. The policy decision to impose austerity by cutting vital social spending after a financial crisis is often presented as an unavoidable necessity, but this is a false narrative. It is a political choice made by powerful actors, and that choice disproportionately targets and harms the weakest members of society.

When economic systems truly collapse, the results are horrific and target the most vulnerable. Sustained economic decline broke down civil liberties during the Great Depression, leading to the rise of fascism.

The most powerful historical examples of rights collapse occur under extreme scarcity and institutional failure: the Holodomor famine was a deliberate political act to seize sustenance and suspend the right to life; in Post-WWII Berlin, the breakdown of order led directly to mass violence against civilian women; and the Great Famine in medieval Europe showed that a failing legal system leads people to commit desperate, destructive acts.

Our defense against such horrific reversals of human freedom and rights relies on our commitment to equality and the political will to protect the vulnerable, regardless of the economic climate. Unfortunately, that will is the exception, not the rule, as most economic systems gravitate towards the concentration of wealth and power.