In response to Monday's ruling from Florida U.S. district judge
Roger Vinson, which voided Obamacare in its entirety, a favorite mantra
of the left has reemerged with vigor: "health care is a right."
This claim is not merely false, but also destructive and tyrannical.
Before evaluating whether a particular thing is or isn't a right,
the term must be defined. Merriam-Webster online defines a right
as "something to which one has a just claim." This definition
does not address the question of what it is that constitutes that just
claim, but merely indicates that the existence of some such
claim is an essential characteristic of a right.
It falls upon the science of ethics to determine the nature of
rights' claims. In Moral Rights and Political Freedom,
Professor Tara Smith defines rights as "moral claims to freedom of
action"[1]. Notice that the corollary obligations imposed upon
others by the rights to freedom of action are negative --
there is no requirement that an individual take any positive action in
order to fulfill the claims asserted by the rights of another.
As human beings, our essential means of survival is rational,
productive action. Rational action requires that each individual
be left free to use his own judgment and initiate action for his own
benefit. Freedom is therefore an essential basic need derived
from the nature of men. All those who value human life must
correspondingly acknowledge freedom as a fundamental right.
Further, this freedom to act is useless if the property acquired
through productive action can be expropriated. To deprive an
individual of his right to keep the product of his life-sustaining
action is to deprive him of the right to sustain his life.
Property rights are therefore an extension of the rights to life and
liberty.
Also, freedom is necessary for the pursuit of happiness and
fulfillment in life; no such pursuit can be advanced from within the
confines of a cage. And no individual, even if compelled, could
ever "redistribute" his happiness to another -- happiness is a unique,
personal, self-generated virtue.
As suggested above, there is only one means by which men's rights
can be violated: force (including its indirect form, fraud). The
basic governing principle of a just, civilized society is that no group
or individual may violate rights by initiating the use of
force against any other group or individual.
This moral principle most certainly applies to government.
Though its retaliatory use of force against criminals and foreign
aggressors is necessary for our protection, the government may not
initiate force against innocent citizens. This is where Obamacare
and the fallacious claim upon which it rests -- that health care is a
right -- enter the picture.
If health care were a right, then the corollary obligation imposed
on all men would be that we must actively work to provide health care
for all others, regardless of the burden imposed on our own lives and
the lives of our loved ones. And the government would be
obligated to enslave the people and forcibly expropriate our wealth to
any extent necessary for the provision of universal health care.
Case in point: the individual mandate, myriad regulations, and
multi-billion-dollar tax increases that come along with ObamaCare --
and that is just the beginning.
If health care were a right, then every time someone spent his
money for his own enjoyment, he would be violating the rights of those
who need health care by betraying his corollary obligation.
Spending his own money as he wishes "wastes" resources that could
otherwise have been used to provide health care. Perhaps this is
what liberals have in mind when they complain that taxes are too low.
Even more absurd is the implication that the "right" to health
care has for the health care industry. Imagine, for instance,
that a doctor invents and markets a new drug that can extend an average
person's life by twenty years. Is this entrepreneur violating the
rights of those who cannot afford the drug by selling it to those who
can? Is everyone else now required to give up even more of our
resources in order to provide this drug to all?
Perhaps it is absurd to suggest that there might be an
entrepreneur left in an oppressive society that deems health care a
right, or that anyone would be willing to expend effort toward
production of such a drug in an achievement-punishing collectivist
society with the principle "from each according to his ability, to each
according to his need," ensuring that those with the most to offer
society are to be its most hopelessly oppressed members.
If health care were a right, then life could not exist, nor could
our corollary rights of liberty, property, and the pursuit of
happiness. Since life is the standard and the fundamental
justification for all rights and all values, a "right" that violates
rights and makes life impossible is a wicked, life-negating
contradiction.
To paraphrase Ayn Rand, the essential question here is not whether
or not one person should help another -- the question is whether or not
he has the right to exist if he chooses not to help.
Apologists for the left often say that those who want to impose
government-run health care or other such redistributive measures have
noble intentions. But to claim that health care is a right is to
negate rights. Such a claim, when and to the extent that it is
implemented, destroys rights and destroys the system that would
otherwise facilitate the delivery of vital goods and services -- the
open market.
Even absent a sufficient understanding of the underlying
principles, only willful blindness could account for a person's
inability to acknowledge the abundant factual accounts of misery and
oppression that have been the result in every case where such "rights"
as health care have been forcibly imposed on a people by their
government. Such claims as "health care is a right" are not
merely mistaken -- they are wicked and destructive. It is such
"rights" that are currently destroying our society, and resolutely
refuting them is the only way we can save ourselves.
[1] Tara Smith, Moral Rights and Political Freedom (Maryland:
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1995), p 18.
