The U.N. Charter of Human Rights Is Utter Nonsense

It's missing one right, without which the rest aren't possible

Golding Constable’s Flower Garden by John Constable

I was donating some old books the other day when I came across a little blue booklet entitled Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

According to the introduction, the declaration was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt and adopted by the U.N. in 1948, as a “direct response to the calamities and barbarous acts experienced by the peoples of the world during the Second World War.”

There are thirty articles in total, including four I want to briefly discuss today:

• Article 3- Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person

• Article 4- No one shall be held in slavery or servitude

• Article 23- Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment

• Article 25- Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, house, and medical care

What a joke.

Folks in the aftermath of World War II had a once-so-far-in-human-history opportunity to build a just and more global economy, and instead, they wrote down a bunch of naive, pithy, highfalutin dreams that rich elites and their economists would soon trample to death in the mud.

You see, friends, NONE of those laudable articles are achievable due to the economic system in which the rich have captured us.

The entire UN Declaration of Human Rights is utter nonsense because it is missing one fundamental human right without which all of these other rights aren’t even physically possible.

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Humans need more human rights

With the following human right, the rights to life, liberty, security, freedom from slavery and servitude, free work choice, and adequate living standards are not physically possible for all:

The right to access land and its resources freely.

It’s hard to believe in our detached-from-biological-reality age, but land is still a fundamental requirement for human survival:

No land, no food. 
No land, no water. 
No land, no shelter. 
No land, no clothes.
No land, no heat source aside from the sun.

Without land, you can’t even have an iPhone, a Tesla, or virtual reality.

And here’s the thing:

All the land and all its resources were once free to all.

Now, it’s all been monopolized — seized by force and later re-branded by the brain-washing propagandists as “private property.”

How can everyone truly have the right to life if they don’t have the right to freely access land and its resources?

The elite’s “answer” to this question is that landless people have three options for gaining access to “property”:

1. Borrow money at interest and buy land/resources. (Read: Allow someone to exploit you for a profit, based on the theft of once-common land.)

2. Rent land/resources at a profit to someone else. (Read: Allow someone to exploit you for a profit, based on the theft of once-common land.)

3. Rent your labor to someone at a profit and use your pay to get the resources you need to survive. (Read: Allow someone to exploit you for a profit, based on the theft of once-common land.)

I’m sure you can see the glaring and obvious conclusion:

There is no true right to life/liberty/security without free access to land/resources.

There is no true right to just and favorable work without free access to land/resources.

There is no true right to food, clothing, and a house without free access to land/resources.

In a global economy in which all land and resources are monopolized, if you refused to allow yourself to be exploited by banksters, land-lorders, or bosses to access your God-given right to land and its resources, you would be homeless, naked, and starve to death.

The very basis of our economic system is an affront to God, humanity, and reason.

Without free access to land and resources, Article 4 is particularly violated:

“No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.”

Try the opposite — without free access to land and resources, everyone shall be held in permanent servitude!

Without free access to land and its resources, your only true right is the right to be exploited.

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Free land for all

The Bible suggests free land for all — “allotted portions as an inheritance” is the evocative way it’s described. These portions cannot be taken away, but there are rules to ensure environmental sustainability.

How could we apply that today?

When every citizen turns eighteen, they should receive a free piece of land. (In addition to whatever they already own or buy in the future.)

• You could homestead it and live there.

• Or harvest timber and stone to build a house back in your city.

• Or put a cow on it for milk and cheese and meat.

• Or turn it into a retreat cabin or camping spot.

• Or start a business.

• Or plant a garden.

• Or just let it grow wild.

That allotted portion can never be taken away; it’s your new worst-case scenario baseline.

Land rights would raise the floor on poverty: 

• If crushing rents put you in really dire straits like homelessness, you could live and homestead it, or you could do what Leviticus 25:15-16 suggests and sell crop harvesting rights for up to seven years before the land automatically reverts back to you.

• If corporations raise prices too high or suppress wages too low, everyone can general strike and head to the countryside like the Romans did with their Secession of the Plebs.

Suddenly, real freedom is genuinely available.

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Is there enough land?

Yes.

If Canada gave every Canadian two free acres of Crown land — in addition to whatever you already own— Canada would still have 2 billion government acres left over. 

The US could give 1.9 acres of government land to each citizen. 

Even China could give 1.6 acres to each and every one of its 1.4 billion citizens.

But, of course, there are some places where the hyper-rich are hoarding way, way, way too much land.

The simple fix for this is to stop taxing work (income tax), stop taxing spending (sales tax/VAT), stop taxing entrepreneurship (corporate tax), stop taxing development (property tax), stop taxing trade (land transfer tax), and instead simply tax the value of land.

This is justice as its most raw and primal expression: 
If we’re going to allow people to monopolize valuable land and resources, they should have to pay the community for that exclusive access.

Don’t even call it a tax.

Call it a Land Monopolization Fee.

With the entire nation’s tax burden now shifted onto land, this immediately stops people from hoarding so much of it, as they’ll only keep what they can profitably steward.

Land Value Tax (LVT) not only frees up a ton of hoarded land, but it drops land prices so nearly all can afford to buy some.

Plus you can use some of the tax money to help the rest buy land, or simply give them their fair share of the land value via UBI or whatever.

Free land is a moral imperative and the foundation of human rights and sound economics

With free access and land and its resources, suddenly the UN Charter of Human Rights is now longer nonsense. It’s actually possible. 

With free access to land and resources, everyone has the physical base required for life, liberty, security, just and favorable work conditions, food, clothing, housing, and above all, freedom from permanent slavery and servitude.

But why would the elites who control the global economy want you to have freedom from perpetual slavery and servitude?

That’s their entire business model.

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Explore Jared A. Brock’s books and films:

Redeeming Uncle Tom: a documentary about the real-life slave who inspired the nation-shaking novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Red Light Green Light: a documentary about human trafficking and how to stop it.

Over 18: a documentary about pornography addiction.

A God Named Josh: a myth-busting biography about Jesus’s politics, economics, and philosophy.

The Road to Dawn: A biography about Josiah Henson, the real-life hero who inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

A Year of Living Prayerfully: a comedic 37,000-mile pilgrimage around the world.