Right to housing, health care, etc.
“right” to housing, health care, education and more — We often hear that we have a “right” to housing, health care, education, and many more things. These so-called “rights” are very different from the rights that are discussed in the Declaration of Independence (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). The kinds of rights our founders said were guaranteed to us are called “natural rights” or “God-given rights”, which do not require anything of other people except not to plunder us or kill us. They are basically the right to be left alone and to be treated with respect. On the other hand, these new so-called “rights” involve imposing real obligations on other people. For example, if one person has the right to housing, then somebody else has an obligation to provide it. The same with health care and education. With our God-given or natural rights, we are all treated equally, but these new “rights” create winners and losers. Also, in order to enforce these “rights”, somebody must impose the obligations, either by forcibly taking money from some people to provide the “rights” to others or by forcibly requiring some people to provide the goods and services directly. So these new “rights” must be understood to be not a form of liberty but rather a form of slavery – forcing some people to serve others whether they want to or not. As with “distribution of wealth”, if we are going to support these new “rights”, we have to ask the question of who is morally superior enough to be given the power and authority to decide which people should be forced to serve and which people will be served?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
