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QOTD: Rights vs Needs December 22, 2008

Posted by federalist in Healthcare, Natural Rights.
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Paul Hsieh in a letter in today’s WSJ:

Health care is a need, not a right. Rights are freedoms of action, not automatic claims on goods and services that must be produced by another. Attempting to guarantee an alleged “right” to health care must necessarily violate actual individual rights and will destroy the American economy in the process.

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1. federalist - July 19, 2009

Thomas Szasz offers another good take on the subject.

Our national conversation about curbing the cost of health care is crippled by the vocabulary in which we conduct it. We must stop talking about “health care” as if it were some kind of collective public service, like fire protection, provided equally to everyone who needs it. No government can provide the same high quality body repair services to everyone. Not all doctors are equally good physicians, and not all sick persons are equally good patients.

If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price. We will become the voluntary slaves of a “compassionate” government that will provide the same low quality health care to everyone.

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2. federalist - September 13, 2009

Perhaps Cliff Asness says it best:

Listing rights generally involves enumerating things you may do without interference (the right to free speech) or may not be done to you without your permission (illegal search and seizure, loud boy-band music in public spaces). They are protections, not gifts of material goods. Material goods and services must be taken from others, or provided by their labor, so if you believe you have an absolute right to them, and others don’t choose to provide it to you, you then have a “right” to steal from them. But what about their far more fundamental right not to be robbed?

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