If you ever read the UN Declaration of Human Rights, you will see that almost every one of those rights has not yet been fulfilled on a global scale. It seems to me, if anything, that individual rights have not gone far enough. Last week on NPR I heard Etzioni along with a professor from Berkeley whose name escapes me now. Etzioni said something to the effect that we all agree we need less government now. Government is a messy business, but it is the only institution which can possibly take on the incredibly difficult task of insuring some basic form of equality among all of its citizens.
Government is a large, awkward, bulky institution.
This is the task of individuals in interpersonal interactions. The function of government is to legislate and ensure the basic rights as provided for in any particular democratic insitituions constitution. This process could go much further towards ensuring personal freedoms and individual rights if there were processes which were not interfering with the process, such as large corporations, wealthy individuals and persons with special access to the process of democracy. It could also function better from the bottom up if individuals had more freedom, freedom from work, freedom from the consumer process, freedom of interaction with other citizens etc. What is needed is more rights, more individual freedoms.