Monday, September 7, 2009

Healthcare as a "Right"

Patch Adams braved a rainy Saturday to join Janet's K & N corner protest. He has a video with an 18-year old counter protester who claims that healthcare is a "right". I don't think the counter protester understands how rights work. I'd recommend this lengthy article Rights, Responsibilities, and Communitarianism:
Thus a "right," plain and simple, always implies some duty in others: they must observe your right through some kind of appropriate behavior or recognition. Thus, if you have a "right" to have a job, it is going to mean that someone is going to have the duty of giving you a job. A "responsibility" is a duty. What we can call the responsibility to take care of one's own interests really means a duty not to be a burden to others, which means a duty not to use them by trying to fraudulently impose a non-contractual duty of commission on them.

1 comment:

Jim Durbin said...

I should mention at this point that the very idea of a "right" to healthcare is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. Constitutional rights are always spoken of in a negative manner, detailing exactly what the government can't take away. Your "right" to free speech is absolute, and the Bill of Rights merely restates that.

To assume that a right is now positive, is to twist the Constitution and the meaning of freedom from defense of your rights to a giveaway.

It's very poor thinking, or rather feeling, on the part of that young buck. Maybe Obama should speak about that, seeing as he's the universe's greatest constitutional scholar.