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Argument: Free, universal health care is an illegitimate "positive" right

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Parent debate(s)

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Rights are God-given and innate, unlike the notion of a right to health care

  • Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) - "No tribunal, no codes, no systems can repeal or impair this law of God, for by His eternal laws it is inherent in the nature of things."[1]
  • Professor Iredell Jenkins of the University of Alabama Law School. American Journal of Jurisprudence. 1973. Quoted in Medical Warrior, p. 96. - "Traditional legal rights are primarily protective: they guarantee citizens certain basic freedoms and immunities, and protect them against intrusion or arbitrary action by the state. These rights do not bestow any positive benefits upon the people...these traditional rights are not conferred on citizens by the state; rather, the people hold these rights prior to and independently of the state, which is merely enjoined to respect them and assure their free exercise."[2]
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Legitimate rights are only "negative" rights

  • "Health Care Is Not a Right". Leonard Peikoff, Ph.D. December 11, 1993 - "All legitimate rights have one thing in common: they are rights to action, not to rewards from other people. The American rights impose no obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation to leave you alone. The system guarantees you the chance to work for what you want—not to be given it without effort by somebody else.
The right to life, e.g., does not mean that your neighbors have to feed and clothe you; it means you have the right to earn your food and clothes yourself, if necessary by a hard struggle, and that no one can forcibly stop your struggle for these things or steal them from you if and when you have achieved them. In other words: you have the right to act, and to keep the results of your actions, the products you make, to keep them or to trade them with others, if you wish. But you have no right to the actions or products of others, except on terms to which they voluntarily agree.
To take one more example: the right to the pursuit of happiness is precisely that: the right to the pursuit—to a certain type of action on your part and its result—not to any guarantee that other people will make you happy or even try to do so. Otherwise, there would be no liberty in the country: if your mere desire for something, anything, imposes a duty on other people to satisfy you, then they have no choice in their lives, no say in what they do, they have no liberty, they cannot pursue their happiness. Your 'right' to happiness at their expense means that they become rightless serfs, i.e., your slaves. Your right to anything at others' expense means that they become rightless. That is why the U.S. system defines rights as it does, strictly as the rights to action...
...The rule now is for politicians to ignore and violate men's actual rights, while arguing about a whole list of rights never dreamed of in this country's founding documents—rights which require no earning, no effort, no action at all on the part of the recipient.
You are entitled to something, the politicians say, simply because it exists and you want or need it—period. You are entitled to be given it by the government. Where does the government get it from? What does the government have to do to private citizens—to their individual rights—to their real rights—in order to carry out the promise of showering free services on the people?
The answers are obvious. The newfangled rights wipe out real rights—and turn the people who actually create the goods and services involved into servants of the state....
...Under the American system you have a right to health care if you can pay for it, i.e., if you can earn it by your own action and effort. But nobody has the right to the services of any professional individual or group simply because he wants them and desperately needs them. The very fact that he needs these services so desperately is the proof that he had better respect the freedom, the integrity, and the rights of the people who provide them...If a person is getting health care for nothing, simply because he is breathing, he is still getting charity, whether or not President Clinton calls it a 'right.' To call it a Right when the recipient did not earn it is merely to compound the evil."
  • Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D. "Is There a Right to Health Care?". Medical Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 4, July/August 1999, pp. 125-127 - "Natural rights embody the concept of individual autonomy and negative rights that are inalienable and inherent to human beings. Natural rights (e.g., life, liberty, the owning and disposing of property, and the pursuit of health, occupation --- and happiness), like human rights, can be exercised by all individuals simultaneously without infringing and trampling on the rights of others (i.e., negative rights concept). When governments transcend these rights with welfare rights, entitlements, and redistribution of wealth schemes --- in the name of compassion, utilitarianism, or some greater common good --- it squarely infringes upon the autonomy and basic rights of individuals and corrupts the negative concept of the law.(5)
The French statesman, Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) in his monumental book The Law wrote that negative laws impose nothing upon the individual, but a mere negation of unjust actions. '[The laws] oblige him only to abstain from harming others. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor, his property. They safeguard all of these. They are defensive; they defend equally the rights of all.' Moreover, 'when the law, by means of its necessary agent, force, imposing upon men a regulation of labor, and method or subject of education or religious faith or creed --- then the law is no longer negative. It acts positively upon people. It substitutes the will of the legislature for their own will.'(8)
It has been stated that the welfare clause in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to distribute entitlements and redistribute wealth. But in discussing this clause, Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'a distinct substantive power, to do any act which might tend to the general welfare, is to render all the enumerations [of their specific constitutional powers] useless, and to make their power unlimited.' And James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, in a letter to Edmund Pendleton dated January 21, 1792, wrote: '[If] Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.'"
  • David Kelley Objectivist Philosopher. Kelley D. Is medical care a right? View from the right. J Med Assoc Ga 1993;82(11) quoted in Medical Warrior, pp. 98-99. - "A right is a principle that specifies something which an individual should be free to have or do. A right is an entitlement, something one possesses free and clear, something one can exercise without asking anyone else's permission. Since it is not a privilege or favor, we do not owe anyone else any gratitude for their recognition of our rights. But there is no such right [to medical care]. There cannot be --- not in a free society which recognizes the genuine rights of individuals to their own autonomy."[3]
  • Dr. Tom Huddle On DB's Medical Blog. May 10, 2007- "If we had more general obligations to aid strangers that were absolutely unconditional—if we HAD to give our money to the street-person asking for it once we confirmed that he needed it to gain something he had a right to—our own negative rights to choose what to do with what is ours would be nullified; a conclusion most of us could not accept. Because there cannot be unconditional duties to provide goods and services, there cannot be unconditional rights to them, however necessary they may be. Our common morality posits an unconditional duty not to harm; but a conditional and limited duty to help."
  • See also Wikipedia:Negative and positive rights for a good distinction between negative and positive rights. The philosophical divide can be categorized roughly as between conservative (negative rights only) and liberal (believing that negative and positive rights are both legitimate).
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The United Nations Charter offers too many "rights" and should not be used to justify universal health care

  • Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D. "Is There a Right to Health Care?". Medical Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 4, July/August 1999, pp. 125-127 - "...influential medical writers mention the United Nations Charter as an exemplar of human rights. It's not. UN rights are a deceptive illusion. Natural rights are God-given or nature derived, not government granted as is the case with UN rights. True natural rights are intrinsic to our humanity. The UN enumerates a myriad of rights in the various charters only to qualify them out of existence in the same document, a few sentences later. Take for instance, the 1966 UN International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights granting the rights to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion...subject only to such limitations "that are prescribed by law and are necessary."(3) [Emphasis added.]
You see, in UN documents, rights are granted but then are subject to arbitrary cancellation by government under UN authorities - sometimes in the same paragraph in which the rights are granted. The same is the case with the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which after enumerating a myriad of "rights and freedoms" states, 'these rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purpose and principles of the UN.'(4)
That is not the case with genuine basic rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness as stated in our Declaration of Independence and our U.S. Constitution, which are stated to be God-given or nature derived and which cannot be taken away arbitrarily by the state. And, that is why our First Amendment states that 'Congress shall make no law' regarding those natural rights, in contrast to the UN rights.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he followed a path blazed by John Locke (1632-1704) which extended as far back as Medieval philosopher and scholar St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and even the Roman statesman Cicero (108-43 BC) to the philosophical tenets of the natural rights of citizens, the basic rights to life, liberty and property.(5) St. Thomas Aquinas recognized the fact that if human law "deflects from the law of nature, it is unjust and is no longer a law but a perversion of law." And Cicero, who did not believe in a Judeo-Christian God, but recognized natural law, predicated that the power of the state be limited.(6) He wrote:
[W]hat is right and true is also eternal, and does not begin or end with written statutes....From this point of view it can be readily understood that those who formulated wicked and unjust statutes for nations, thereby breaking their promises and agreements, put into effect anything but 'laws.' It may thus be clear that in the very definition of the term 'law' there inheres the idea and principle of choosing what is just and true....Therefore Law is the distinction between things just and unjust, made in agreement with that primal and most ancient of all things, Nature; and in conformity to nature's standard are framed those human laws which inflict punishment upon the wicked but defend and protect the good."
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America's founding fathers did not explicitly define health as a right

  • "Health Care Is Not a Right". Leonard Peikoff, Ph.D. December 11, 1993 - "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). We have certain specific rights—and only these."
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Counter-argument

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See also

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External links

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