The expression "fight for your rights" is usually associated with socialism. Socialists and statists fought—and still fight—for positive rights, as in FDR's famous "freedom from want," which suggests that the people have the right to receive from the state the material conditions necessary for an arbitrarily defined "dignified" life, such as housing, healthcare, education, pension, and various kinds of economic security. But human wants are endless, which explains why rights to water and air have been added to the list, and why public funding will eventually run out. New positive "rights" are emerging, e.g., rights related to the environment, to artificial intelligence, to indigenous populations, to climate, to gender identity, and on and on.

The fight for positive rights has been tremendously successful, not least because it has suited the ruling minority to make it its battle as well, for political reasons. More positive rights mean more power to the state and its cronies. But this fight has also been successful because negative rights (i.e., property rights, freedom of association, etc.) have not been sufficiently defined and protected. Indeed, the introduction of ever-more positive rights always happens at the expense of negative rights. There is a fundamental injustice when the state forces redistribution towards some at the expense of others. Positive rights are a violation of negative rights, meaning the right not to be coerced, however subtly or indirectly this happens.

It becomes clear then that though "rights" are the same whether positive or negative: the two concepts are radically different since in the former case it only comes at a cost to third parties. Thus, Rothbard wrote that "the concept of 'rights' only makes sense as property rights. For. . .there are no human rights which are not also property rights." In this sense, freedom of speech is an owner's right to decide what can be expressed on his property. Freedom of movement and of immigration is the owner's right to decide who may enter and stay on his property, and so forth.