No Right to Health Care Supplied by Others

Today, I was trying to get my son a swine flu vacine and like this week, last week, and the week before, his doctor said they did not have any yet. His grandmother found a place about an hour away, when we got there, most of the patients were illegal aliens with their children. We filled out the forms and offered our insurance card and they said, keep your card, this is free. May GOD bless all of us, U.S. too

The place is located at 1000 Lee Street in Baytown TX

check out our web site www.johnwieder.com

the last two paragraphs are most important.

"negative individual rights:" the rights of each individual to go unmolested by their neighbor and to pursue their own happiness as they see fit.

"Positive individual rights": people have the right to GOODS. [healthcare, welfare, foodstamps, childcare, etc.];

The Road To Serfdom: the government is supposed to "provide" the people with these things if and when they "cannot" earn them themselves. It does so ineffectively (insufficient knowledge), unfairly (insufficient agreement on _means_ vs. ends), and destructively (distorting markets and breeding dependence) - requiring more governmental "help"...

Paraphrasing John Galt: "Who is going to produce the goods so that the government can 'provide' them? Blank out." In order for one person to receive goods they have not traded an equivalent value for, those goods must come from someone who does not receive some such equivalent value. This can be accomplished voluntarily and is called charity. Otherwise, it must be done by force and it is called theft, appropriation, regulation.

Notice that the very concept of "positive rights" is inherently contradictory. The concept of positive rights is built on and presumes the concept of negative rights. Once people get the goods [positive rights], they are supposed to be able to enjoy them without fear of having them being taken away [negative rights]. The people who gain the positive rights have their negative rights protected, but those who are forced to give up their property to others have their negative rights violated.

The crucial point here is that the granting of "positive rights" to some people ALWAYS involves the infringement, denial, or sacrifice of other people's "negative rights." Since it is immoral to violate people's negative rights to life, liberty, and property, all positive rights are built on immorality.

>>Since it is immoral to violate people's negative rights to life, liberty, and property, all positive rights are built on immorality.

It depends upon your source of morality.
People who use Political Correctness as their source of morality will find any excuse to justify a positive right, going so far as to base judgments on intentions rather than results.

I'm starting to think Political Correctness is a mental disorder.

"Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end." -Unverified

It is human to try to get as much wealth with as little effort as possible and thus this "parasitic attitude" is a natural human characteristic, not a problem.

The problem is the system that enables wealth redistribution - democracy is the problem.

If I dislocate my arm I have every right to pop it back into place. If I get a cold I have the right to eat chicken soup. I also should have the right to convince (possibly by payment) someone else to fix my arm or cook my chicken noodle soup, although that is not true in practice. I have the right to health care if and only if you mean health care literally. If, however, you mean health care as a service someone else provides, then no, no one has the right to someone else's time and labor.

I have quotes from Thomas Jefferson saying what I am saying so comparing what I am saying to totalitarianism or communism IS the act of a child.

Likewise, I've quoted the same from Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, George Wahington and even Hayek himself.

I am not the radical one here. I am the pragmatist with imperfect recommendations for a complex world that have some hope of advancing the human enterprise.

Free market fundamentalism is just one more form of useless fundamentalisms pushed by those incapable of dealing with real world complexity.

muirgeo,
you really should read hayek more closely.

He did not define a 'complex world' as a world where all the 'pragmatic' goverment has to do is twiddle some knobs and the nice straight supply curve will magically shift into the socially optimal position on our diagram (which is what most arguments about healthcare reform boil down to- "market failure").

Hayek was talking about a 'complex world' because of how highly specific and personalised knowledge is distributed among individuals and cannot be known by governments- therefore the "collective brain" of the market has far more knowledge than even the cleverest planner. In a 'complex world' idealistic proposals to grant people a 'right' to healthcare are bound to have unforeseen consequences.

I am not a 'free market fundamentalist' because I support the market any more than you're a 'Copernican fundamentalist' because you believe the earth goes round the sun. If someone supports a position for rational and valid reasons they are not a fundamentalist.

Gosh I hate getting down into the mud. Since you have no appreciation for what Professor B is saying, allow me to ask two questions, your answers to which should be a pretty good indicator of a lot of things.

Suppose I grant your belief that people are entitled to a positive right to health care. Who shall you make provide such services? And if you believe they have a positive right to educating, who shall do the educating? If your answer is that, "there are enough people willing to provide this service," then how can you argue that the rest of us need to be expropriated for it? After all, if there are enough people who would volunteer to provide these mandated rights ...

However, this second question is what I am really interested in, Suppose I grant you that we have a positive right to health care, and also the positive rights you believe our "idle wealth" can be used to provide. Do you really believe that resources are so unlimited that we could all have as much of all these things as we want? Are you not willing to make any tradeoff? If you really want "free" health care for everyone, are you willing to eliminate public schooling? Or are you willing to eliminate efforts to combat global warming? My guess is no ... and if that is true, then that is the world of unicorns.

All of this is notwithstanding your utter misunderstanding of what human rights are - they are nothing more than a property right to obtain the means to do what things you care about. So, Don's "free speech" is nothing more than the property right to obtain the means to produce speech. And because the guys with guns are forcing him to use government courts to protect these property rights does not make him a hypocrite - would you allow us to get rid of government courts in favor of competing courts? Probably not. So again, who is the hypocite here.

Finally, in this world of positive rights, who is this "we" that agreed to provide health care to everyone else? If you met Don on the street, based on your vitriol I do not expect you would feed him or care for him? And what of the other "mindless" libertarians on this site? There is no we. And I don't want you providing me health care, nor would I expect it.

One last question perhaps ... how come there was no positive right to health care in 1776? Or 1850? Or 1950? ... when did it become a right for you? And what next? Laptops are a natural right too?

What exactly is free market fundamentalism? Since when is cherishing liberty a dirty idea? And talk about incapability in dealing with complexity .. can you really argue that with a straight face after reading Hayek and the material taught on this site. The site is essentially built as a criticism of those who cannot deal with complex processes - particularly those who think there are simple solutions to them.

What a waste of my time - and yours.

I am too tired to reply to all these posts. But I don't think it's a waste of time for people to sincerely discuss how we should organize society.
It's a great age old debate and the way we set up society has profound implications for the future of our children.

"My friends, the issue today is between the idle holders of idle money and the struggling masses who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country."

William Jennings Bryan , Among the Farmers speech 1896

>>But I don't think it's a waste of time for people to sincerely discuss how we should organize society.

That has to be one of the single most arrogant and contemptuous statements I have ever read in my life.

Thomas Jefferson, William Jennings Bryan, William Tell, who cares. Arguments from authority are fallacious.

Again, increasing the regulation and central planning already in place in our health care system may or may not be the wisest, fairest, and most prudent use of our 2009 resources, but it is logically inconsistent to label the fruits of another’s labor as a natural right.

(And what is this health care anyway? Even the best 1989 health care may be sub-par and even malpractice in 2009. Do you have a right to a clinic being within so many miles of your home, wherever that is? Open certain hours? Able to perform any particular testing or none at all? Should you be able to walk in unannounced whenever you want? How many 24 hr. ER’s within how many miles of your home do you have a right to? What kind of doctors from what caliber of schools and training programs do you have a right to? Should they be informed of your rights before they sign up?).

But you don’t agree that rights exist in nature, so you are clearly using the term to mean something else.

You may have a great collection of quotes, but you certainly don’t have quotes from Washington and Jefferson that rights are not natural. They may have been wrong in your estimation, but they were indisputably firm adherents of the natural rights doctrine, correctly understood.

I have the right to bear arms. Whose gonna buy me a gun?
What better way to help me provide for my common welfare?
C'mon, you're all richer than I am. Why so greedy? - any gun will do, I promise.

If the issue is not really health care, but redistribution, why don't we ever challenge the fundamental and essential assumption of it, that taking from the rich to give to the poor redeces inequality?

Almost everyone here ought to know by now that it cannot reduce but only increase it.

So, why are we keeping it a secret?

Whose side are we on?

Speaking for myself, I got tired of pointing it out repeatedly on this board (typically in reply to murgeo's paeans to totalitarianism) and having it ignored.

People either get it or they don't: free markets produce a large middle class and smaller poorer and richer classes whereas un-free markets concentrate wealth in the hands of the elite.

I'd go a step further. Un-free markets create a much, much smaller pie. Not only do they have greater inequality, but the wealthy elites in a closed, un-free market would be poor compared to most people in a free-market society. The only reason that oligarchs in the USSR were wealthy is because of knowledge gleaned from advances that occurred in market economies.

You contradict yourself just like dg lesvic. The richest person in a commie system is poor relative to the richest people in a capitalist system therefore the inequality would be LOWER in the commie system.

In other words:

capitalist inequality: Bill Gates net worth - a hobo's net worth = $50 billion inequality.

commie inequality: commie leader who exploits natural resources because it the only value things left - a dirt poor peasant = $50 million inequality.

Inequality is greater in the capital system over the commie system because some people are highly capable and can reach dizzying heights of wealth whereas commies are fighting over the remaining pieces of a decaying small pie. In other words, commies head into a pyrrhic form of equality - everyone's equal but poor. Capitalists let natural inequality flourish and freshly baked pies litter the landscape: some are extremely huge whilst others are piddly however everyone is allowed to bake their own pies. Dg lesvic's 'masterstroke' sunk, QED.

Well all you need to do is look at the Soviet Union to see how one can totally destroy the upper middle class(kulaks) through force. The question is will America ever arrive at the conditions that led to the Russian Civil War?

Which is more brutal, more mean? Advocating against the use of force except in defense, as Prof. Boudreaux and his classically liberal compatriots do, or advocating the use of force to take from one group of people to give to another?

And any wealthy person today who gained their wealth by force is supported by neither myself nor Prof. Boudreaux, of course. However, you do not right the old sins of imperialism and mercantilism by way of the new sins of socialism and modern big government.

Many teenagers when daydreaming about living in a fantasy feudalistic world, imagine that in that world they'd be part of the nobility.

Immature chilidsh people like muirgeo, whose bodies may have matured, but their minds have not, imagine that in a land where government vigorously control all aspects of society that it will be they who are in charge.

I don't think they grasp
a) How unlikely it is that they will get their hands on the throne, let alone keep it from being grabbed by some Stalin or Che Gueverra

b) How the very act of exercising such control will, inevitably, by creating shortages and surpluses in production, as well as discontent among a population which is thwarted from doing what they want to do, force them to be increasingly tyrannical to maintain control.

Muirgeo and others believe the statement "We are government".
They are unable to draw the distinction between society and government, and they are likely to describe the actions of government in the first person.
These very same people seem unable to draw the distinction between health care and health insurance.

And this guy is a doctor?

"Genuine rights – such as freedom of speech – are not commodities to be purchased; nor does their existence require the on-going application of human labor and other resources to ensure that they are adequately supplied."

This sounds good but no such right exists in nature. Tell a Grizzly bear about your freedom of speech or go to Somalia and speak away.
Your free speech requires courts, legal tender, police and a national defense and the labor of others to provide those resources. Those people protecting your free speech have a right to health care if we as a society say they do... and we do say so.

Why so mean Don? Why so brutally mean when we have so much idle wealth with which we can easily afford to end so much horrible pain and suffering? You hold a theory which seems to lack empiric support over the real world realities and practicalities. My guess is your current health care IS publicly subsidized... and again so is your free speech.

I want to laugh when I read poorly reasoned comments such as the above, but then I remember you're a doctor that works with children, and suddenly your lack of understanding and common sense don't seem so funny.

Quote from muirgeo: "Your free speech requires courts, legal tender, police and a national defense and the labor of others to provide those resources."

No, it doesn't. It merely requires a mutual agreement to not perpetrate violence on others. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people out there that refuse to make this agreement and are more than willing to use violence to plunder others' wealth for all manner of reasons (e.g., welfare, health insurance, etc.), so people have to spend money on things that protect their rights.

Of course, what do you do when the plunderers are those that are supposed to be protecting rights?

Muirgeo,

"...when we have so much idle wealth with which we can easily afford to end so much horrible pain and suffering?"

In other words, as long as the political class believes that anyone, anywhere, is "suffering", they have a right to seize any and all property from anyone. Does that really seem practical to you?

Is muirdog this stupid and dumb? How old is he anyways to throw around words like "mean"? Isn't that what children do?

You either misunderstand natural right theory or understand it and misleadingly conflate it with postive rights.

The fact that government is required to protect natural rights does not mean they do not exist ontologically prior to government - in the understanding of natural rights theorists. It would be better - more intellectually honest - to acknowledge that Prof. B.'s characterization of natural rights is correct and then explain why you reject the theory. Of course, if you reject it and the founding principles of classic liberalism, the burden is on you to explain why democratic - or any other - might does not simply make right.

But the grizzly bear remark suggests that perhaps I give you too much credit.

My family has always been quite an artistic influence, which got me into making random kinds of art projects, but the emergence of the clothing line all started in my high school years when one thing led to another.