Can someone explain the difference between negative and positive rights? It's not making any sense to me.
Negative right: a right that is ensured by the voluntary non-infringement of others. E.g: you don't need resources to uphold the right to free speech, you only need to make sure nobody is running around slashing the throats of people who disagree with them.
Positive right: a right which is ensured by the active contribution of resources by others, voluntarily or forcibly. E.g: universal healthcare is a right which would require a tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars to maintain.
The problem with positive rights is that there is no logical reason why you shouldn't just stop at nationalized healthcare, nationalized transportation, nationalized education, etc. and instead go full-fledged communism. Positive rights imply that the communalization of [thing] is better than [thing] being left to private hands; but if that's the case, why not communalize all the things? It's the slippery slope at it's finest.
Negative right is freedom from something
Positive right is a right to something
At a fundamental level negative and positive rights clash because from the negative perspective, on what grounds should one be forced to provide rights for others from his resources?
Of course, to make this shit work in real life involves logically unsatisfying compromises on top of compromises to avoid the ideas from regressing to unsustainable dystopias.