In a free society, all individuals enjoy the same fundamental right to property, which subsumes the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (The application of rights to children will be considered near the end of the course.) In this sense, liberalism treats all individuals as politically equal, consistent with Jefferson's observation (cf. p. 5.2:22). Although liberal policies tend to eliminate poverty and to improve the economic conditions of the masses, liberalism does not demand that all individuals should be economically equal, since in a free society variations in native talent, effort, and other circumstances may lead to differences in income and wealth.

Since rights are moral principles prohibiting us from interfering with the freedom of others, i. e., their freedom from coercion, rights can be abrogated only through the initiation of force. (The concept force, as described in pp. 4.5:9-11, subsumes fraud, extortion, and seizure by stealth.) When rights are abrogated, defensive (preventive or retaliatory) force may be required to restore them. The violation of rights, in other words, is coextensive with the initiation of force, including force wielded not only by individuals, by also by larger organizations such as governments. From this perspective, all the forms of governmental intervention that we studied in Subsection 4.11 involve the violation of rights. All such violations create victims—a concept widely abused in contemporary discourse. When used in a political context in this course, the term "victim" denotes only individuals who suffer, directly or indirectly, from the violation of rights via the initiation of force.