BrianGarst.com

The Business and Media Institute reports on a video released by Al Gore, where the man who leads a global eco-religion has weighed in on the issue of health care. For all you plebs out there, listen up. “Health care is a universal right.” The Goracle has spoken.

The former vice president managed to find time this past weekend to post a series of videos on his peer-to-peer video sharing site, Current.tv – including one calling for “government-funded” health care. Gore is chairman of Current.tv.

In a setting reminiscent of a bored college student making a video in his dorm room, Gore is shown proclaiming that healthcare in America “ought to be a matter of right,” addressing what he thinks to be an “immoral” healthcare situation.

“I strongly support universal single-payer government-provided or government-funded health care” droned a languid Gore in his video, now also listed under the title ‘Gore Goes SiCKO’ on Michael Moore’s Web site.

This claim that health care is a right has been advanced with increasing frequency over the years. The reason we are hearing this claim is simple. The left believes that rights come from government. Based on this presumption, they conclude that if the public accepts that health care is a right, they will then demand that it be delivered from government. In turn, leftists get expanded power and control over your lives, which is – by definition – what they seek. There are two serious flaws in this logic. 1) Rights don’t come from government. 2) Health care is not, and cannot be, a right.

Let’s return for a moment to our founding documents and the philosophy that informed them. The Declaration of Independence asserts that men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We are endowed by our Creator. These are not rights which come to us by the grace of enlightened bureaucrats. These natural rights exist as a consequence of our basic state of nature, which the Declaration of Independence claims produces a “separate and equal station” among men.

These ideas descend straight from Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. In it he declares that “all men are naturally in…a state of perfect freedom to order their actions…” He also includes this list of rights which those found in the Declaration of Independence are obviously derived from (emphasis added):

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions…

It is only with this understanding of our natural liberty as the foundation for these rights that we can understand rights as they exist today. Furthermore, it is necessary to understand that each right also carries with it a duty. Let’s take, for instance, some of those rights as listed in the Bill of Rights, all of which are derived from those three articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Take the right to free speech. With it comes a duty that no one (specifically government) infringe upon the free speech rights of others. The same goes for the second amendment. With the right to bear arms comes a duty to respect, and thus not violate, the property rights of others. The same applies to freedom of religion. On and on it goes.

There is a very important pattern to understand from these duties. They all require only negative action; essentially, that individuals not infringe upon the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness (property) of others. There can be no such thing as a right that requires positive action, for to do so would violate the fundamental right to liberty of all others. If an individual is said to have a right to health care, that does not merely require the rest of society to not infringe upon the basic right to life of that individual, it compels the rest of society to act, to care for that individual. Nothing that violates the right to liberty can itself be a right, for any such right would itself destroy the very foundation upon which all rights are built.

Health care is not a right, it is an anti-right. The left would have us believe that we advance by accepting such things as health care as a right of all Americans. It is an insidious cancer that would be introduced (or has been already) to accept such rights that require active duties on others as legitimate; for once it is acceptable to violate one of the three most basic rights in a specific circumstance, it is acceptable to violate any of them under any circumstance. Such a state of affairs can lead to no other end than tyranny.