Keeping Slaves Is Not A Right

I saw a video clip this morning at Tech Ticker, a part of Yahoo! Finance, featuring Congressman Ron Paul speaking about the looming health care destruction bill working its way through the Senate. I wish I could embed the clip here but there doesn't seem to be a way to do so, so here's the link:

Ron Paul: Health Care Is Not A Right
Congressman Paul gets as far as making the statement that health care is not a right, which is correct, but probably on account of limited time for the interview, he did not explain precisely why it is not a right.

The left has been repeating the fallacy that health care is a right for so long that too many people simply believe that now. But those same people, I would bet, would be opposed to slavery. Why do I bring that up?

A right that you have is an obligation upon others. To use your right to freedom of expression as an example, the obligation others have to you in this regard is to not prevent you from exercising free expression. This is sometimes called a "negative right" - it describes the prohibition placed on everyone else from doing some specific thing to you. You of course have this obligation toward all others, and as such each of us is secure in this particular right.

If you take the concept I've just described and check it against the other rights you have that are laid out in the Bill of Rights of our Constitution, you'll note that they describe things that are inherent to your person. In other words, the rights laid out there that you have are things that come from you. Free expression is simply something you can do. Your right to keep and bear arms exists for you simply because you exist, as does your right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. What you produce is rightfully yours because it comes from your labor, which is essentially your time on this earth combined with the use of your physical and mental faculties. The list goes on.

What is health care? Health care is a product. What is a product? In this sense, it is something that must be produced by another human being to exist. If there is a "right" to a product, that means that someone has an obligation to produce it. A written contract between consenting parties can establish such a right, until the contract is satisfied. But that is a matter of agreement and temporary. If health care is a "right" in the sense of the others that you have, that the right exists simply because you exist, then some other person must provide it to you.

There is a word in the English language for people who are compelled by other people to provide goods and services - who must labor - for others: slaves.

Think about it. If someone else must provide you with a product simply because you exist, you are claiming a right to their labor, which as I said before is a person's time on this earth plus the use of their physical and rational being to produce it. You are making a claim over another person's body, their mind, and their life. You are claiming ownership of that other person. You are attempting to own slaves.

Now I know that most people who repeat the lie that "health care is a right" are not interested in owning slaves and in most cases find the idea repugnant. That does not change the essential nature of the social arrangement being proposed here, however. It's simply a matter of misunderstanding about what is a right and what is not that leads many to make this moral mistake, a state of affairs helped by politicians who are all too happy to replace reasoned examination of issues and ideas with soundbites and slogans (not to mention a public education system that plays its part by simply failing to teach these basic concepts anymore). Of course we all want health care, and we should all be able to get it, just like Congressman Paul has said. But our want does not establish a right, especially when it requires forcing others to give the product in question to us. Rather, an environment of true competition should be fostered (not the "competition" that the liar, Barack Obama, keeps talking about with the "government insurance" plan that will in fact destroy competition). Market place competition has made formerly expensive things commonplace, such as Congressman Paul's example of cell phones: when the floor is open to real competition, a multitude of producers come forth that are always chipping away at the margins of established competitors, seeking to bring down prices and maintain profitability so as to capture some market share for themselves. In such an environment, producers AND consumers benefit. Such a state of affairs is also moral; owning slaves is not.