Sen. Rand Paul knocks one out of the park in 1:21, on the HellCare issue. Ya’ know, the more I see of this guy, the more I like him. As we’ve said here before, conservatives can do business with little ‘L’ libertarians. This is really worth a watch, the man condenses a lot of words into a short, precise and spot-on assessment of not only the phony ‘right’ to health care, but all of our new cultural fad of creating ‘rights’.
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Those are the only G-d given rights we have. The rest are only government or societal constructs and have no more weight or importance than a 3-year old’s banging their sippy cups for more cake. The flaw with our constructed rights is that someone else loses their rights granting yours. The Emperor’s fine post below on Nazi Germany is a great example. The unions blather on about ‘Worker’s Rights’ as if there is a fundamental rule that all workers should be organized and that only then they would achieve some ephemeral fairness in employment.
Health Care- Another constructed ‘right’, so much in fact, that the average person might think it’s in the Constitution as well. Americans regardless of income have always managed to get medical care when it’s needed. The left demagogues about hospitals refusing to treat emergency patients is nonsense. The professionals running those ERs would never refuse to treat an emergent condition. They might be required to transfer the patient after they’re medically stable, to another facility, but again that’s not a refusal to treat anyone. In the past, patients and doctors have worked things out to pay for services rendered, many stories from history tell of country docs being paid in eggs or other farm products, but everyone got what they needed in the system. Today, one sees numerous advertising for prescription drugs where the makers offer to help those that can’t afford the drug. As an anecdote, many folks have set up a successful barter system around professional services, i.e. “I’ll tuneup your car in exchange for treating my daughter’s abscessed tooth.” There can be any number of ways that Americans could obtain medical treatment without government interference providing ‘rights’ that don’t exist.
Americans are the most generous people on earth, demonstrably so, and we care about our neighbors true to Judeo-Christian values, regardless of any particular faith we hold as individuals. As a country we’ve worked hard to correct injustices in the past such as bigotry, and the mistreatment of workers by their employers, but that doesn’t necessarily establish the corrected condition as a ‘right’. That we allowed unions to represent workers for the purposes of fairness in employment doesn’t establish the union as a ‘right’ inasmuch that workers should be required to join. I would point out that the current viewpoint of the unions, that all workers should be represented by them, creates a condition that in some ways is analogous to what the unions purported to correct. I don’t claim that unions should be abolished, but I do believe no one should be required to join as a condition of employment and that should workers voluntarily join a union, they should be permitted to withhold any portion of their dues that are being used for activities they individually don’t support.
Our obsession with new found ‘rights’ invariably leads us into slavery, forcing individuals into supporting others’ artificial rights. True rights are those freely given by definition, and they are neither compelled nor require someone else to surrender theirs.
We really need to re-examine this obsession, it can only end badly for us.
-Carry On