… is from page 25 of Acton Institute President Fr. Robert Sirico’s 1994 monograph, A Moral Basis for Liberty:
Many of the confusions of our age rest on a loss of certain crucial distinctions. The most apparent is the distinction between rights and privileges. John Hospers, my philosophy professor at the University of Southern California, used to say we have undergone a “rights inflation.” As in a monetary inflation, the value of the common unit of measurement has been drastically watered down. For all the talk about rights, we lack a clear understanding of what constitutes meaningful rights.
