There is no such thing as a right. If there were, then people could not violate them. The Muslim crudaders would not have been able to rape and enslave infidel men and women in their imperialistic expansionary period. The Scandinavian raiders would not have been able to rape and take as slaves for sale large sections of Europe. Dublin, Ireland, was in my understanding founded as a center for the slave trade.
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued (in my understanding, based on having read several internet pages devoted to him and the book “Wittgenstein’s Poker”) that non-empirical arguments are intrinsically either tautological or nonsensical.
If you define a right as “that which exists the way I conceive it”, then what you have said is that a right is equal to a “right”. The abstract ideal is equal to the word, which is equal to nothing empirically, and thus necessarily solipsistic, and meaningless in a social context.
When Jefferson modified Locke slightly in stipulating “self evident” rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, he was describing ideals, and not realities.
What he was REALLY saying is that in his considered view human felicity would more naturally flow from social and political orders oriented around those principles. He was quite right in this.
But we need to be careful with this word “right”, in how we use it. If we fail to see that these rights are stipulated in such a way that measurable effects can flow from them, then they become tools for tyranny. We can measure the effects of the ideals Jefferson offered us. In the last two hundred years we have grown steadily in the freedoms offered to American citizens, have grown in prosperity and power, and have done so, with a large 4 year interruption, in conditions of peace.
The “right” to income equality and other such rights no more exist that “rights” to life liberty or property. What we must look to is what empirically verifiable effects they “work to”, in the Hayekian sense.
Have to run. That will have to do.