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.

“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.

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.

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

And this guy is a doctor?

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?

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

“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

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.

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.

(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.

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.