Can you name a few collective rights?
I understand that there has been a long history of thinking about collective rights, perhaps starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his popular sovereignty in contrast to John Locke's treatment based on individual sovereignty, but we can readily determine that the founding fathers, to a very great extend, accepted a model of individual rights over that of collective rights. Rousseau possessed an aversion to representative-democracy, that is republican government, and greatly preferred direct democracy where the collective will of the people would be more fully expressed.
To a great extent, Locke's rights where negative rights as in "I have a right not to have my property stolen", or "I have a right not to be compelled to worship God", or "I have a right not to be assaulted". Rousseau introduced positive rights as in "I have a right to eat" or "I have a right to medical care" which only exists in a collative rights model as positive rights necessarily place a burden on the community.
I understand that, in this modern day, a great many people believe in collective rights as the ideas of Rousseau have been extended by such thinkers as Pierre-Joseph Proudhonded and eventually Karl Marx. What should be understood is that the ideas of individual sovereignty and popular sovereignty, of negative individual rights and positive collective rights are incompatible with each other and that republican forms of government favor the former while more democratic forms of government favor the latter.
The republic our founding fathers created was based on a model of individual rights as in "all men are Created equal", with each man possessing individual inalienable rights granted by God, and not collective rights, but as we have become progressively more democratic over time, individual rights, especially individual property rights, have been continually eroded in favor of collective rights. This does not mean that there was no intrusion of ideas from the popular sovereignty camp, but rather that it was the ideas of Locke that dominated in preference to those of Rousseau. Certainly the idea of a right to revolt is something of a collective right, at least in Madison's mind, else the Timothy McVeighs of the world might have some actual justification for their despicable actions.
The primary danger of a collective rights view is that it is often used to justify the infringement of individual rights as can be readily illustrated by considering the controversy over the Second Amendment where those who would like to limit or infringe the individuals right to keep and bear arm construe the Second Amendment to provide for a collective right.
The same is true of those that justify the taking of private property through taxation to pay for any number of "collective" rights which finds expression in such social welfare programs as Medicare, Social Security, Food Stamps, WIC, HUD, at. el. The problem is that a man that is not entitled to the products of his own labor, his own property, is not a free man as is apparent when we take the ideas of collective rights to the extreme experienced in communist nations like the former Soviet Union. In such states, private property is literally a crime, it is theft from the collective as all people already own all property collectively and no person has any individual right to any property.
It saddens my heart to witness that so many Americans are willing, even glad, to exchange their individual liberty for the incremental slavery of collective rights.
The Second Amendment protected an individual right when it was ratified, the question is if we will, in the end, have any individual rights at all or if all of our rights will be held only as members of groups? In such an event I think I would, however ironic it might appear, participate in a popular revolt, a collective action, in an effort to restore my liberty as an individual so that I might once again live in a nation where the government acts to preserve our natural rights as individuals instead of acting to extinguish the same.
Respectfully,
Richard
not sure where this is going but lemme tell you it'll take a lot longer to email 769mb unless you're on a fat fiber pipe. 
I'll be happy to set up an ftp account for you to upload this to a speedy webserver but I need assurance that it's not copyrighted information
)