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 Really tangled paragraph 

The conception of a right to something that implicitly creates an obligation on someone else to provide that thing (a positive right) is widely challenged.  You can not enforce your wish for something (under the auspices of a right) if it implicitly constitutes an obligation on another to do something for you.  However, one person's right to something creates a negative right in that you have the right for that thing not be interfered with by another, and that other is obligated not to interfere with your right to it.  The obligation test is widely used to determine what constitutes a right.  To illustrate: You have the right to own an axe, but you do not have a right to an axe.  If you do own an axe, others have an obligation not to steal it.

I've got a post-graduate education, and I had to read practically every sentence of this paragraph more than once to parse it. And it has a lot of problems beyond that:

 Normally we avoid second person. I don't see why it is needed here.
 ""widely challenged"" with no citation: I have almost never seen this challenged except by liberatarians. I'm pretty confident that most people, for example, consider that the right to life extends to the point of creating an obligation for a government or society to attempt to rescue victims of a natural disaster. I would doubt that there is a ""widely"" held belief that a person dying of thirst while someone next to him had abundant water could be reasonably expected to die respecting his neighbor's property rights.
 By the second sentence, this has switched to imperative (or, more precisely, hortatory) mode, which is entirely inappropriate. It becomes a statement of a narrowly libertarian conception of rights, in the article's narrative voice.
 Again ""widely used"" without citation. I cannot name a country where this, in general, has the force of law. Certainly not the U.S., one of the more libertarian countries in the industrialized world, but one which recognizes a right to a publicly financed primary and secondary education.

In short: poorly written libertarian cant. 

I'll allow at least 48 hours (and probably more) for someone to rewrite this in a way that belongs here, but if it hasn't been substantially fixed by then, I intend simply to remove it. -  | Talk "