Here's the backdrop: in 2005, the US Supreme Court ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales that a person does not have a constitutional right to police protection, even in the presence of a restraining order. In line with many other decisions, the court ruled that police do not have an obligation - including a Constitutional obligation - to protect individuals from other individuals. In other words, even if you pay your taxes, which partially go to pay for police protection, the government is not obligated to provide you this protection and cannot be successfully sued if it fails to do so. To make it crystal clear, the government's highest court has said you do not have a right to police protection services.
(As a tangent, remember that you also don't have the self-defensive right to resist an illegal entry by police into your home and that police have the "power to inflict pain on anyone who treats them disrespectfully, power even to kill with relatively little fuss." But we digress...)
Fast-forward to today where 28 of the 50 states are suing the US federal government to stop Obamacare, a universal health care coverage law. One of the goals of the lawsuit is to determine if the government can force individuals to purchase health insurance. (A sideshow in the case is that the government is granting waivers to many Democrat union allies. Currently, more than 1,000 organizations have been granted waivers.)
People disagree on whether or not taxation is moral. They disagree on whether or not a social contract exists. But Rand Paul, United States Senator for Kentucky, son of Ron Paul, and considered a statist by some, has upped the language used in the debate: he has equated the right to health care with slavery. Whereas the US Supreme Court has said that you do not have a right to police protection services, that same government wants to make it a requirement for people to provide health care services to you.
Does that sound like hypocrisy? What is a right? Do we have a right to demand services be provided by others? Do we have a right to demand that someone else take care of us and, if they won't, to leverage the police to force them? If a person is paying their "fair share" of taxes, should he have a right to health care as long as some amount of those taxes are going to the health care worker? Is it really slavery if the health care worker is getting paid? Does it matter how much of those taxes are going to the health care worker?
With regard to the idea of whether or not you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction.
I'm a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. That means you believe in slavery. It means that you're going to not only enslave me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses... If you have a right to their services, basically once you imply a belief in a right to someone's services - do you have a right to plumbing? do you have a right to water? do you have a right to food - you're basically saying that you believe in slavery. You're saying you believe in taking and extracting from another person.
Our founding documents were very clear about this. You have a right to pursue happiness, but there's no guarantee of physical comfort. There's no guarantee of concrete items. In order to give something concrete or someone's service, you've got to take it from someone. So there's an implied threat of force. If I'm a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care, do you have a right to beat-down my door with the police, escort me away, and force me to take care of you? That's ultimately what the right to free health care would be. If you believe in a right to health care, you're believing in basically in the use of force to conscript someone to do your bidding.
Rand Paul Equates Universal Health Care And Slavery
DISCUSS!
Original posting by Braincrave Second Life staff on May 14, 2011 at http://www.braincrave.com/viewblog.php?id=554
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