Lehigh Valley Conservative Voice

The question came up on an Internet discussion whether healthcare is a right. The assertion was made that healthcare is not a right, but a “privilege”. I’d argue that it is neither:

I agree fully that there is no “right” to healthcare, nor to food, clothing, warmth, shelter, education, subsistence, or any material or physical human need. These claimed “rights”, created and granted by the “Statist” are simply an illusion and a diversion from the concepts of Liberty that actually are unalienable, “endowed” rights of all humanity. The concept and spirit of such rights was articulated in the Declaration of Independence–life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (virtue)–and in the Bill of Rights as the first ten amendments to the US Constitution–freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, the right to be secure in your person and your possessions, to be free from unwarranted search, seizure, and arrest, the right not to be compelled to be a witness against one’s self, the right to counsel and to be faced with witnesses and accusers, to not be subject to cruel and unusual punishment, the right to a speedy trial, etc., etc.

I disagree that healthcare is a right, but I also disagree that it is a privilege. Healthcare, and all the rest of the things on the list of “securities” are “responsibilities”, laid at the feet first of the individual, and then at the feet of the community engaged in free enterprise and the enjoyment of actual rights. With Liberty comes responsibility, and to forfeit Liberty to evade responsibility is to beg for tyranny.

The whole evil scam by political philosophers like Karl Marx and by career politicians in the US Congress and White House is to tempt free people to abandon their God given Liberty in exchange for relief, granted by the “rule of man”, from the “responsibility” for providing their own sustenance and the sustenance they owe to their families, and the aid and concern they owe to their peers. The aim of the ruling class offering comfortable relief from responsibility is to make it so that their subjects, little by little, lose their understanding of the concept of unalienable rights and Liberty, until the memory of Liberty disappears from their consciousness.

The aim of the “Statist” is to break the spirit of individual, and of civic responsibility, and replace it with dependence on, and obedience to, a ruling government occupied by an elite ruling class, the kind of government where the subjects do the work and produce goods and provide services, and the rulers collect both the bulk of the fruits of their labor and place burdensome taxes on everything that their subjects actually consume for themselves. As the paradigm shifts from Liberty to Tyranny, the ruling elite get richer and more powerful while the subjects become more and more burdened by regulation and taxation, and less and less likely to see in themselves the power to regain their Liberty, if they even remember what it Liberty is.