Dear Friends,
It seems to me that to say that health care is a right is to say that someone’s right to healthcare supersedes someone else’s right to property.
The State lives at cost to the taxpayers. Those that pay taxes pay for government… Everyone pays, in some way, cigarette taxes, gasoline taxes, income taxes, etc… Therefore when government pays for something i.e.; healthcare, it is not government that bears the cost, it is the taxpayers. The money is taken, at gunpoint if need be, against another’s will to be used for government, denying them the free use of their property. So to fund a right to healthcare, someone must be denied his or her right to property.
Government never thinks about how a tax increase is going to effect the people who will bear the tax. The fact that taxes always lower the standard of living of the people taxed is of no concern to the State. In fact the State has an interest in making and keeping the people dependant on the State. Dependants are at the mercy of their benefactors. But, like a skunk, when we see an easy meal we willingly walk right into the trap. Then we gaze about in amazement that we are caged, and lament our predicament.
Regardless of the future consequences of present questions, we are faced with the conundrum as to, what is the quantifiable level of “right” people have to their personal property, real and chattel,, or, even if a person has a right to his or her own property. However I can not see a way around the question that if a person doesn’t have a fairly high quantity, if you will, of rights to his or her personal property, how then can you say that anything less than the right to personal property, can be a right.
To say that a person has no right to his or her own property, is to say that everything we have, we are allowed to keep at the suffrage of the government. If that is the case, we survive at the behest of government. Because food is a form of property and if the State decides to withhold food, we die, naturally. (As was done to over ten million Ukrainians in the 1930’s by the government). So, if our very lives are at the mercy of the State and can be taken from us at the State’s whim. To say that we have no right to life but we have a right to healthcare? It seems to me to be a non sequitor. What good is healthcare if the State decides we have become a burden?
Now we come to the other question, does a person have a right to healthcare, and if so, to what quantifiable level? It depends on at what magnitude you want to set the term rights. The more things that are encompassed by the term rights the lower we hold them in the aggregate. When we qualify things like We have a right to foot massages, as rights, we lower the definition of the term. The lower the definition the less we esteem them. The lower the level of what you refer to as rights the easier it is for tyrants to take them away. So to ensure that we always have basic rights we must necessarily keep the definition high.
Another problem with calling things rights that may or may not be is that the term has been used as an excuse for atrocities in the past, Strum Drang Osten comes to mind. That philosophy ended in the Crimean War. Later the idea was resurrected as “The German people have a RIGHT to feed themselves!” culminating in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The term rights has a history of being a lever to get people to do things that they otherwise would never have done.
So my inclination is to hold the value of a possible right to healthcare lower due to it’s effect on the value we hold other rights, and the slippery slope of it’s possible use as a lever, than what I perceive to be a true right, the right to have and to hold property, to my own benefit and freely held.
