You've heard it a million times.
"Health care is a right!"
And that is then used to justify any sort of legislative excess, any Congressional dealmaking, any violation of the Constitution which was intended and deliberately designed to protect us from our government.
But here's the thing; health care is not, and cannot be, a right.
I will explain, at somewhat greater length than I have done in comments on other people's posts. Hopefully, I will give you guys some food for thought.
A right is something inherent in your humanity; it's built in, and cannot be denied, removed, or abrogated in any way.
There are only two first-order rights; there are any number of derivative rights.
The first-order rights are simple; as a human being, you have a right to your life, and you have a right to your freedom.
Those rights are usually discussed as trumping everything else; but there is another factor inherent in the definition of "right" that is usually ignored: your rights cannot infringe on those of someone else.
You have a right to your life, which is infinite and indivisible, PROVIDED THAT the things you do to sustain that life do NOT infringe on anyone else's rights.
You have a right to your freedom, which is infinite and indivisible, PROVIDED THAT the things you choose to use it for do not infringe on anyone else's rights.
It is the only inherent limitation.
You can do anything you want, except infringe upon other people; therefore you cannot have a "right" to steal from people, regardless of how hungry you get, or how high your medical bills get.
I will come back to that.
Those are the only two first-order rights; all other legitimate rights are derivative of one or both of those. For example, the right to own property; you MUST be able to own property, because as long as other people can take away your means of sustaining your life, you can't keep your life. This is what makes stealing morally wrong; when you steal from someone the things they've worked for and earned, you are infringing on their right to their life.
Slavery - defined as "involuntary, uncompensated labor," to avoid discussion of the goth girl who likes to wear a collar - is morally wrong because it infringes on both first-order rights; it denies you your freedom, and takes away control of your life.
The purpose in most of the Constitution, as is clearly evident in the Founders' other writings, such as the Federalist Papers and their personal letters, is to secure both first-order rights from intrusion both by other citizens and by the federal government.
Health care is a service; it must be provided to you by someone else. Even if you are a doctor yourself, there are some procedures you simply cannot perform on yourself; health care is entirely, completely, totally and without reservation dependent upon other people to provide it.
This is no problem; because you have the right to own property, you have, derivative of that right and the right to freedom, the right to exchange your property for someone else's goods or services; this is the moral foundation of capitalism, and it is why the free market is the only morally justifiable economic method. Any other method of transfer or exchange of goods and services involves someone getting stolen from, even if it's a government doing the stealing; this is the primary moral problem with most of the things the government does outside the powers enumerated in the Constitution, and with some of the things that WERE enumerated in it.
What you cannot do, however, is exchange someone else's property - including their earnings - for a third party's goods and services.
Because if you are taking someone else's property without their permission, it is stealing, and violates their most fundamental right, their right to their life.
This is why all forms of transfer payments are wrong; this is why welfare is wrong, progressive taxation is wrong, the "prebates" in the so-called FairTax plan are wrong; Social Security is wrong; tax-supported pension funds are wrong; many, many things the government does are wrong. They may be LEGAL, but that doesn't matter, especially under a government of tyranny, which passes any laws they feel like and demands that we comply with them.
I have said before that the only morally justifiable tax - and it is still sketchy - is one whose funds are used to provide value to one hundred percent, no exceptions, every single person who pays it.
Welfare benefits those who are on it, but openly violates the rights of those who pay higher taxes to fund it without receiving a similar check from it, which is why it's wrong.
Health care suffers from the same problem. If you take my tax dollars to pay for someone else's health care, you have failed to provide benefit to me; you have stolen my money; you have violated both my freedom and my right to my life. It is worse when you follow the path of the "Obamacare" bill, and provide for penalties against me if I don't choose to participate in your travesty; this violates my freedom even more openly and completely.
So much so, that it reduces me to performing...
...Involuntary, uncompensated labor...
You cannot have a "right" to own slaves.
You cannot have a "right" to steal the money from my wallet, the food off my table, or the table.
Since this incarnation of "health care reform" does exactly these things, it is morally wrong, period.
My personal opinion is that the best way to reduce the costs inherent in health care and health insurance both is to remove the single biggest spender from the equation; take the government out of the health care business. My opinion is open to debate.
"Rights" are not. You cannot debate human rights; the only applicable debate is whether, and which, rights apply to a given situation; we call the results of those debates "ethics."
In this case, the approach chosen by our government, in direct and open defiance of the obvious will of the people, violates the rights of ALL the citizens of this country.
There are many ways our health care system could be improved; there are many ways our health care costs could be reduced; there are ways our health insurance system could be improved.
Allowing the government to take control of one-sixth of the economy, in a naked power grab for control of something specifically forbidden by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, is not one of those ways.
Health care cannot be a right, because it requires the actions of others.
You have an infinite and inalienable right to buy whatever you can pay for.
I will support that to the hilt and willingly work to devise ways to increase your buying power, decrease costs, and generally make health care more available and affordable for everyone.
Turning the citizens of the United States into slaves for the purposes of providing kidney transplants to indigents is immoral and wrong. It violates the first-order rights of every citizen of the country, even the ones who benefit from the bill, because it turns them into thieves, even if they don't realize it.
Health care is not a right.
The ability and freedom to BUY health care, or not to, is.
When the government takes over health care, and penalizes you for choosing not to buy it, or to buy coverage the government deems insufficient, your freedom is abrogated again.
There is nothing right, and everything wrong, with this bill, period.
I urge you to consider that, at great length.
Mostly, I urge you to be aware of the depths of tyranny and immorality our government has reached, in direct contravention of the Constitutionally enumerated powers, and the Constitutionally mandated legislative process; entitlements are nearly impossible to repeal once they are in place, and the simple fact the Republicans and Tea Partiers seemingly forget is that even if they win every House and Senate seat that's open in November, they will not have a sufficient majority to overturn a Presidential veto - and Obama will unquestionably veto any repeal bill.
Government health care is here to stay; it is not going to be repealed.
It is one more step in our government's slow-motion process of throwing the Constitution aside openly and turning this nation into Soviet Russia, circa 1967.
You owe it to yourself to be aware of this, so that you can take the measures necessary to protect and defend your right to freedom and your right to your life.
