• The so-called "right to vote" and similar "rights" of popular participation in the government are actually privileges rather than basic rights and depend on the specific structure of the government (to be discussed later). For this reason, a liberal government may withhold voting and other participatory privileges from felons or noncitizens, for example, without such exclusion constituting a violation of human rights. In some cases, however, such privileges may be a virtually inescapable feature of a government based on the defense of rights, in which case these privileges may be regarded as tantamount to "rights" in the stricter sense of the word. We may speak, for example, of the "right to due process."

As we have seen, a number of paradoxes and controversies about freedom arise only because the issues have not been properly framed in terms of property rights. When rights are fully understood, as the above examples illustrate, there are no true conflicts among the rights of different individuals. In principle freedom is not something that must be limited in a social setting. Like other valid principles, it is absolute, although it must be interpreted contextually (cf. pp. 3.4:4-7). The cliché that "my freedom ends at the end of another man's nose" does not mean that the concept of freedom is overly broad or that its theoretical range must be curtailed in practice. Rather, the cliché describes exactly how far that concept extends—since my property does not include the body of another.     

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