Recommended reading

I found this to be very well-written. The concept of "rights" today largely seems to have devolved into a demand for whatever somebody wants. It's a little more complicated than that, however...

Rights, liberties, powers, and immunities are all kinds of "rights." Most importantly, each kind of right implies a certain kind of liability in others, and each kind of right also has its opposite form of liability. Thus a "right," plain and simple, always implies some duty in others: they must observe your right through some kind of appropriate behavior or recognition. Thus, if you have a "right" to have a job, it is going to mean that someone is going to have the duty of giving you a job. A "responsibility" is a duty [4]. What we can call the responsibility to take care of one's own interests really means a duty not to be a burden to others, which means a duty not to use them by trying to fraudulently impose a non-contractual duty of commission on them.

The opposite of a "duty" is a liberty, which means that there are no rights of others that need be observed in a particular case. A liberty is a right to act without restraint, which means that a liberty implies no right in any other -- bringing us back to the opposite of a right. Similarly, in the other diagram, a "power" [5] is the ability to change the legal status of something or force a legal compliance in another. A power thus implies a liability in another, that they must recognize or comply with the power exercised upon them. The opposite of a "liability" is an immunity, which is an exemption from being subject to someone else's powers. An "immunity" implies a disability in another, that they are without a power to affect the immune person in that case. Since liberties, powers, and immunities are all rights, any right may be said, after a fashion, to imply certain duties, liabilities, or disabilities in others.

Communitarianism wishes to deny the liberty and give to the public (the "community") the power to regulate the behavior of individuals (impose disabilities) in order to limit public liabilities. That is the point: the Communitarian emphasis on the "community" makes everyone a ward of the community and responsible to the community, rather than their own keeper and responsible to themselves for their own actions.