Health Care Is Not a Right
By Leonard Peikoff, Ph.D.
. . . Now our only rights, the American viewpoint continues, are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. According to the Founding Fathers, we are not born with a right to a trip to Disneyland, or a meal at Mcdonald's, or a kidney dialysis (nor with the 18th-century equivalent of these things).
(This particular example is from a paper given in opposition to the Clinton Healthcare plan in 1993 Interesting that he added the right to "property" which was actually edited out of the final Declaration of Independence because the Founding Fathers knew it would make them look kinda like greedy dicks, and the Declaration was nothing if not a PR move. But I digress)
Health Care is not a right
By: Iain Murray and Roger Abbott
Washington Examiner
11/17/09 5:10 PM EST
Health Care is NOT a Right
By Jake Towne
Jake Towne is running for U.S. Congress in eastern Pennsylvania's 15th district in 2010.
Anyway, you get the point. I keep hearing people say "healthcare is not a right, and blah,blah,blah. . ." and it's driving me crazy.
First off, who says it's not a right? I think that's probably a point on which reasonable people might be able to disagree, but if you have the right to LIFE, why not health? How much life are you going to have if you can't get to a doctor when you're sick? How much pursuing of happiness are you going to be able to do?
But, for the sake of argument, let's say that healthcare isn't a right. Who fucking cares? Do you think there's a Constitutional right to paved roads? No, but no one objects to the government providing paved roads (except maybe the nihilist wankers at the Ayn Rand Institute)
Is there any guarantee of the right to public libraries? Or mail delivery? Why don't the teabaggers decry the Postal Service as an at6tack on our basic liberties? Why isn't the library being picketed by rednecks in tri-corner hats shouting about Communazis and death camps? I think it's because once people get used to a government-supplied service, they realize that they like it. It may even occur to them that paving roads is a good use of their tax dollars and not something which they could really pull off themselves.
What the "not a right" freaks either don't understand, or ignore, is that in a Democratic system, the job of the government is to do whatever we decide we fucking want it to do. Libertarian types like to prattle on about how the job of the government is to provide police and an army and maybe a couple of other things, but anything they don't like is "not the job of the government." Bullshit! The government works for us, we can tell it to do whatever we want (within Constitutional limits, but even the Constitution can be amended.) If the majority of Americans want the government to give out ice cream cones and puppies to all the good little boys and girls, then that, by God, becomes the job of the government. And if a majority want the government to stop paving roads and delivering the mail, then those services would no longer be the government's job. I know, it's a little more complicated than that, because we're a republic, not a democracy, but that's basically how it works. And all the screaming, wailing and teabagging in the world won't change that.
