Private Action and Freedom of Speech

Individual rights are absolute. In isolation, the individual’s ability to exercise his rights are bounded only by his imagination and his own physical limits.

As a producer, the individual retains the same sort of dominance: any product that issues from his applied mental and physical labors is his to control. Without his reason, without his applied talent, his creation would be a mere possibility in the ether of the plane of abstraction. His rights to control his production are as sovereign as his right to control his own body.

This means he has the requisite authority to set the terms by which others may use his product. No individual has rights to the product of another, only the privileges the producer chooses to extend.

If a third-party actor is allowed to dictate the terms on which he may use another’s creation, the producer is no longer master of himself. He is enthralled, not only in body, but in mind as well, to the desires of others.

Need is not a claim upon another. One cannot escape the fact that the existence of all material good depends entirely upon someone’s efforts. That effort cannot be disregarded without subjecting the producer to a form of slavery.

Your rights end where another’s begin: this is a familiar maxim. But it is often understood as a limitation upon…