Natural Rights and Responsibilities: A Response

This essay starts off well, but seems to disregard its own premises and initial conclusions.

So it is reasonable, if survival is the source of rights, that the society as a whole also bears the responsibility to care for an orphaned child. But how can the society as a whole fairly distribute responsibility for the child without taking from individuals? Common solutions are unsatisfactory.

This is correct; sacrificing the individual to the group is fundamental to all tyranny.

A capitalist would say that we must simply rely upon the charity of individuals; however, strict capitalism provides no guarantee that anyone will actually donate any labor or goods, and inevitably delegates the responsibilities of the entire society to a small group of individuals who are dedicated to making sure the society fulfills its obligations.

Here, the logical conclusion is made, with respect to the above premises. An individual does not have the right to survive; that is impossible, as everything dies. An individual does have the right to secure his own survival. This is the foundation of human rights.

A communist would say that every individual must contribute according to his or her potential to produce. Unfortunately, this solution ignores both the great difficulty of determining an individual's capacity to produce, and the fact that spending time not producing goods or services can also have an impact on an individual's ability to survive.

Fair enough, but this is more a pragmatic argument, rather than an argument stemming from moral principle. Regardless of what an individual's wealth or survival ability is judged to be, rights are 100% inviolate.

An appropriate solution is to distribute the care of orphans (and of others who are similarly unable to produce and not provided for by other means) evenly among all capable individuals. Rather than requiring that all production go to a central organization (as does communism) or that all production go to the producing individuals (as does strict capitalism), we simply require that able individuals invest a small portion of their spare time providing for those in need.

This is where the argument goes sour, seemingly ignoring the previous conclusion that common solutions are "unsatisfactory." Who requires this, and by what right? This proposal resembles the mandatory military service common to many socialist wastelands, which is an affront to human rights.

My point is that although the Capitalist approach seems to just be ignoring the problem, the reality is that in any free society, there is enough wealth and charity that orphans, etc, will always get taken care of, rather than statist societies, where everyone is forcibly reduced to equivalent levels of poverty.

Also deferred for later discussion is an alternate mechanism by which individuals need not contribute any labor whatsoever to fulfill their obligations, removing altogether the dependence of any individual on the labor of the rest of society.

This could be a much more sensible proposal; I have a feeling it involves robots. No, really.