Former President Jimmy Carter has been meeting with North Korea “diplomats” in recent days. He is pictured being greeted by Pak Ui Chun, North Korea’s foreign minister in the Paekhwawon state guesthouse in Pyongyang, North Korea. President Carter is in North Korea to try to improve North Korean relationships with South Korea and the United States, specifically, and the outside world in general.

Mr. Carter is hoping to cash in on what some see as a warm relationship with North Korea stemming from his having helped work out a 1994 nuclear deal that may have averted a war. Mr. Carter states that during his visit, North Korea has indicated that it wants to improve relations with the United States and is willing to talk with Washington and Seoul without preconditions; except, of course, that North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons program without a security guarantee from the United States; something that is highly unlikely given North Korea’s history of going back on its “guarantees” once it gets what it wants.

However, the most disturbing part of this story stems from our former president accusing the United States and South Korea of violating human rights against North Korea by withholding food aid.

“One of the most important human rights is to have food to eat, and for the South Koreans and the Americans and others to deliberately withhold food aid to the North Korean people because of political or military issues not related is really indeed a human rights violation.”

Let’s take a look at this absurd statement. In the first place, there is no human right to have food. There is a natural right to have the political freedom to own land and to use that land, if one so desires, to grow food for consumption or sale. There is a natural right to seek employment that will provide sufficient wages to pay for food and other basic needs, but nowhere is it ordained that everyone on the planet has a right to expect others to sacrifice their hard earned private property for others who have no legitimate claim to such property.

North Korea has chosen to strip its people of all natural rights. North Koreans are not allowed to own land or to work for themselves. Everyone in North Korea is charged with working for the state. The state of North Korea has been inadequate in building an economy that affords widespread farming and food distribution to its own people.

North Korea has been under the protection of China, a nation that supported the North in its war with South Korea. All one has to do is look at both Koreas to see that when natural rights, and in particular, private property rights, are respected by government, its people thrive and work to grow and expand that nation’s economy. When a nation expands its recognition of natural rights, it is easier for it to become a respected part of the global family where neighbors are willing to help neighbors, not because of force or blackmail, but because they have earned the trust and faith of their neighbors that any assistance given will go to the common good and not to destructive, secret programs of hostility and oppression.

If any nation has an obligation to help North Korea feed its people and to guide it to the table of nations as an acceptable member of our global family, it is China. If any nation is responsible for encouraging, propagating and sustaining human rights violations within North Korea, it is China. If any nation is obligated to assist the development and growth of the North Korean economy, it is China – not America or any other western nation.

Of course, the United States, England, Finland, Norway, Ireland and other nations are free to provide any assistance they wish to provide, voluntarily, but none of these nations has any sort of duty to North Korea to help it feed, clothe and house its citizens or to provide them with luxuries, such as electricity, air conditioning and home heating that we take for granted.

If North Korea wants these things from us, then, they have an obligation to earn them. All that is asked of them is to give up their nuclear weapons program, to stop threatening their neighbors and to act as any other civilized nation is expected to act. Until then, North Korea does not deserve our assistance and instead of President Carter targeting and charging his own country for crimes against humanity under the current circumstances, he may want to reexamine his traitorous position, and then put the focus on those nations most deserving of such charges – North Korea, China and perhaps, Russia as well.

I am afraid, however, that hoping for such a change in perspective from one such as former President Carter is nothing short of pure fantasy. Former President Carter has been a socialist for so long that he is now incapable of finding fault with that system of government and is committed, instead to the destruction of capitalism, even in its mixed economy form. In former President Carter’s eyes, everyone should be equal in the way they live and in the choices they are given – everyone, that is, except people like him who know more about man’s unalienable, natural rights and their associated responsibilities than even their endowing creator, be it God or nature.