Time to Focus on Economic Rights

This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on May 9, 2025.

Since the November, 2024 election, I have talked with dozens of people facing eviction or enduring unsafe and unhealthy rental housing conditions. Not one has mentioned Donald Trump.

They do not talk about the Trump administration attacks on the judiciary, higher education, or the media.

Instead, our clients are focused on their inability to pay their rent or get prescriptions filled. Their priorities are finding work that pays a living wage, or stretching their sub-poverty-level disability checks .

Don’t get me wrong. Donald Trump is very, very bad for our clients. He wants to gut housing programs and food assistance and restrict access to health care. Trump’s attacks on free speech and the rule of law pose less immediate threats, but profound threats nonetheless.

But I was in eviction court in the years before Trump was elected, too. And our clients’ struggles were largely the same. As we have written about here before, there have been reams of post-election analysis saying that Trump’s victory was enabled by the Democrat ticket’s lack of attention to the struggle to afford basic necessities.

So if our clients and the 37 million other people in the U.S. living below the poverty line are focused on economic struggles, shouldn’t that be the case for the rest of us, too?

That is why I want to lift up the argument made by the economist Mark Paul, most comprehensively in his book, The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights . I am late in shining a spotlight on Paul’s book—it was published in 2023—but its message is maybe even more timely now than the day it was published.

Paul’s thesis is simple and direct. “The United States can eradicate poverty and build an economy that works for everyone—that puts, as the mantra goes, people over profits—by adopting social and economic (“positive”) rights: the right to a well-paying job, the right to health care, the right to an education, the right to a home, and more,” he writes.

As Paul notes, the U.S. rights tradition, especially in our constitution’s Bill of Rights, has been focused on protecting only civil and political rights, sometimes called “negative rights.” Those are the rights that prevent government from taking some forms of action: interfering with free speech, arresting and incarcerating without cause, disrupting the privacy of our home and person, etc. Think “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and bumper stickers.

Just fifteen minutes in eviction court show us how these rights are not enough. Free speech does not put food on the table for a family of five. The right to vote is not building a roof over the heads of our clients headed to shelters, their cars, or the streets.

To trumpet U.S. freedom in a nation where 650,000 people are unhoused and millions are on the brink of eviction is an obscenity. Paul quotes the philosopher Isaiah Berlin: “To offer political rights, or safeguards against interventions by the state, to men who are half naked, illiterate, underfed, and diseased is to mock their condition.”

“It’s About Freedom”

Our U.S. laws and culture elevate civil and political rights. But Mark Paul points out that we also have a parallel tradition of defining freedom much more broadly. In one of The Ends of Freedom’s most compelling chapters, Paul traces our long history of championing the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” articulated in the Declaration of Independence before the Constitution ever existed. Thomas Paine called for living wages, old-age pensions, and payments for poor families, with progressive taxation to pay for it. That plan and even broader economic rights could be established in the strong centralized state championed by Alexander Hamilton. I have written before about the aggressive federal government programs providing housing to (mostly white) Americans dating from the 19th century Homestead Act to generous homeownership subsidies that continue to this day.

Paul lifts up Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s explicit call for a U.S.-led movement to guarantee economic rights, which we wrote about here, a logical outgrowth of the New Deal’s aggressive legislative steps towards job guarantees, unemployment old-age insurance, and living wages. FDR’s hoped-for economic rights movement did end up expanding globally but without the U.S. leadership Roosevelt envisioned. Yet, as Paul points out, leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and now Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continue to carry the banner for U.S. economic rights.

So Paul calls for rights to housing health care, education, a basic income, and a healthy environment. In his concluding chapter, “How Do We Pay for It?” Paul flexes his economist muscles. The funding question he insists is a red herring, he insists, given the voluminous examples of the U.S. finding money to pay for breathtaking military costs, not to mention post-World War II social spending. In that era, enormous economic growth was spurred by economic support programs that were funded by deeply progressive taxation. And we can do it again.

Beyond providing a tutorial on monetary policy—bottom line is that “anything we can do, we can afford,” as John Maynard Keynes said—Paul says that guaranteeing economic rights will be a boon for the nation fiscally. “Programs designed to deliver economic rights . . . are investments and should be treated as such,” he writes. “Expanded education, infrastructure, housing, renewable energy, and more will not only increase demand in the short run but also increase the long-tern potential of the economy. In other words, the expenditures will pay for themselves.”

I have argued in the past—and plan to revive that argument very soon—that the best legal path to enshrining economic rights into the lives of Americans is for the U.S. to join the rest of the industrialized world by ratifying the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). ICESCR puts into enforceable law the promises that FDR made for an adequate standard of living, including food, healthcare, and housing.

Paul foregoes discussions about legal processes, instead leaning into the economist’s argument for why economic rights are not just fiscally feasible, they will lead to widespread prosperity. It is a convincing case. His concluding paragraph is worth repeating:

“While an economic bill of rights is about material security—making sure all are able to put food on the table and a roof over their heads—it’s also about advancing a new social contract, one that truly honors people’s inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s about rooting out the deep power imbalances that warp America’s economy and society. It’s about building a sustainable economy and world that works for current and future generations alike. It’s about freedom.”

The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights can be purchased at the University of Chicago Press website here.