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I can't agree with what you are saying, John. I think the argument you are making boils down to saying that people have wants or needs and they should have rights to what they want or need. That's too open ended for me. I think you could justify a right to almost anything with that logic.

The most intuitive argument I know of for establishing a system of strong individual rights is the argument from what some philosophers call "self-ownership." I'm not going to stress this because I'm going to offer a more formal argument. But I want you all to think about it. Doesn't each of us own himself or herself? Doesn't that mean that no one else has the right to use us, control us, or exploit us for their own ends? I think it does. And that, to me, means that we have freedoms or rights that others must respect. Give it some thought and maybe you will agree with me.

But I'm going to propose a more formal justification for individuals rights. I want to refer all of you to the work of Alan Gewirth, formerly at the University of Chicago, and his student Roger Pilon, currently at the Cato Institute. Gewirth has constructed a reason based system of individual rights and Pilon has developed a libertarian interpretation of Gewirth's system.

Gewirth has argued extensively that an individual agent must, under pain of contradiction, insist that he or she and all others have fundamental rights to freedom and well-being. Without going into detail, I want to give you the shortest possible summary of Gewirth's argument in his own words:

First, every agent holds that the purposes for which he acts are good on whatever criterion (not necessarily a moral one) enters into his purposes. Second, every actual or prospective agent logically must therefore hold or accept that freedom and well-being are necessary goods for him because they are the necessary conditions of his acting for any of his purposes; hence, he holds that he must have them. Third, he logically must therefore hold or accept that he has rights to freedom and well-being; for, if he were to deny this, he would have to accept that other persons may remove or interfere with his freedom and well-being, so that he may not have them; but this would contradict his belief that he must have them. Fourth, the sufficient reason on the basis of which each agent must claim these rights is that he is a prospective purposive agent, so that he logically must accept the conclusion that all prospective purposive agents, equally and as such, have rights to freedom and well-being. [Alan Gewirth, Human Rights, p. 20.]

Gewirth's argument is complex. This passage is only a summary. You can look at his book Reason and Morality for the full treatment. My point here is that this sort of argument bases individual rights on reason, not sentiment. The foundations are solid; and as developed by Pilon they are limited in their implications. They do not allow us to create an endless string of rights to everything we need or would like to have. They also give us a basis for limited government instead of the government of the regulatory/welfare state.