First, I will address the definitions of immoral and public option (here, interchangeable with the single payer insurance plan). Immorality is that which runs contrary to the rules of moral and ethical behavior determined by assessing all that is virtuous or wicked in human action and character. Public Option refers to a recently proposed health insurance program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government under the direction of President Barack Obama.
It is important for all American citizens to understand this distinction: Unalienable means incapable of being alienated - that is, surrendered, sold and/or transferred.
Though you can not surrender, sell or transfer unalienable rights, as they are a gift to the individual from the Creator and cannot under any circumstances be surrendered or taken, you yourself can surrender, sell or transfer inalienable rights if you consent, either actually or constructively.
Inalienable rights are not inherent in man and can be alienated by government. Persons do have inalienable rights: Most state constitutions recognize only inalienable rights.
[Consult Black's Law dictionary for a more definitive explanation of the these inherent distinctions.]
All sovereign individuals have unalienable rights.
With a shrinking number of Americans laying claim to the notion that socialized medicine is an honorable remedy for what ails us, I think it is unfair if not unreasonable by its very nature because it is immoral; it is cruel in theory and therefore a disaster in its universal application because health care is not a right.
As American citizens, our only unalienable rights are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s it. What Jefferson and our Founding Fathers insisted on establishing from the get-go did not include a right to a trip to the Magic Kingdom, or endless refills of chicken-in-a-bucket, or a lifetime supply of Insulin to manage diabetes (nor the 18th-century equivalent of these things). We have certain specific rights that are unalienable and only these rights.
Why only these rights? Understand that all legitimate rights have one thing in common: they are rights to action, not rights that entitle you to rewards from other people.
These distinctly 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 by someone else without your ever having to make an effort.
Our 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 this great country of ours: if your mere desire for something, anything, imposes a duty on other people to satisfy you, then they have no choice in their own lives, no say in what they do, they have no liberty, they cannot pursue their own happiness.
Your ‘right’ to happiness at their expense means that they become right-less serfs, i.e., your slaves. Your right to anything at another person’s expense means that they become right-less.
Here are my thoughts regarding the distinction that should be made between providing aid to those in need through voluntary acts of charity and to those in need by extorting funds in the form of taxation:
One does not do away with charity by calling it something other than what it is.
If a person is getting health care for nothing, simply because he is breathing, he is still getting charity, whether the Left calls it a right, an entitlement or a privilege.
To call it a right when the recipient did not earn it merely compounds the immorality. It’s still charity, though now extorted by criminal tactics of force, while hiding under a dishonest name.
As with all goods or services that are provided by some specific group of men, when you try to make its possession by all a right you enslave the providers of the service by binding doctors’ hands and feet to the mercies of the bureaucracy: you wreck the service and end up depriving the very consumers you are supposed to be helping.
To call medical care (or even free medical care insurance) a right will merely enslave the doctors and thus destroy the quality of medical services and products offered in this country, as socialized medicine has done around the world, wherever it has been tried.
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The underlying premise of this discussion concerns publicly-funded health care.
ReplyDeleteThe single-payer option that would make HC universal means that taxpayers would be forced to fund a bureaucracy that would eventually destroy health care.
That is universally immoral.
Obviously, some people can't afford medical care in the US, but they are necessarily a small minority.
However. if they were the majority, the nation would be bankrupt and could not even consider implementing the establishment of a national medical program.
Regarding this small minority: In a democracy they have to rely solely on private, voluntary charity.
Yes, charity, the kindness of doctors or those who are better off - charity, not a right, i.e. not their right to the livelihood or work of others.
And such charity as this has in the past always been forthcoming in America.
The comment is framed within the context of a democracy and not dependent upon the conditions and setting of a free country to understand and appreciate it.
Within 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.