Health Care a Right?

With his usual clarity, Walter Williams breaks down the real difference between negative and positive rights:

"...Say a person, let's call him Harry, suffers from diabetes and he has no means to pay a laboratory for blood work, a doctor for treatment and a pharmacy for medication. Does Harry have a right to XYZ lab's and Dr. Jones' services and a prescription from a pharmacist? And, if those services are not provided without charge, should Harry be able to call for criminal sanctions against those persons for violating his rights to health care?

You say, "Williams, that would come very close to slavery if one person had the right to force someone to serve him without pay." You're right.

Suppose instead of Harry being able to force a lab, doctor and pharmacy to provide services without pay, Congress uses its taxing power to take a couple of hundred dollars out of the paycheck of some American to give to Harry so that he could pay the lab, doctor and pharmacist. Would there be any difference in principle, namely forcibly using one person to serve the purposes of another?...

...True rights, such as those in our Constitution, or those considered to be natural or human rights, exist simultaneously among people. That means exercise of a right by one person does not diminish those held by another. In other words, my rights to speech or travel impose no obligations on another except those of noninterference.

If we apply ideas behind rights to health care to my rights to speech or travel, my free speech rights would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with an auditorium, television studio or radio station. My right to travel freely would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with airfare and hotel accommodations.

For Congress to guarantee a right to health care, or any other good or service, whether a person can afford it or not, it must diminish someone else's rights, namely their rights to their earnings...

Clarence Thomas: How to Read the Constitution

The Wall Street Journal has printed an excerpt of a lecture Justice Clarence Thomas gave to the Manhattan Institute last week. In the the last two paragraphs, Justice Thomas describes the type of jurisprudence we wont be getting with an Obama Supreme Court:

As important as our Constitution is, there is no one accepted way of interpreting it. Indeed, for some commentators, it seems that if they like or prefer a particular policy or conduct, then it must be constitutional; while the policies that they do not prefer or like are unconstitutional. Obviously, this approach cannot be right. But, it certainly is at the center of the process of selecting judges. It goes something like this. If a judge does not think that abortion is best as a matter of policy or personal opinion, then the thought is that he or she will find it unconstitutional; while the judge who thinks it is good policy will find it constitutional. Those who think this way often seem to believe that since this is the way they themselves think, everyone must be doing the same thing. In this sense, legal realism morphs into legal cynicism. Certainly this is no way to run a railroad, not to mention interpret the Constitution. . . .

Let me put it this way; there are really only two ways to interpret the
Constitution -- try to discern as best we can what the framers intended or make it up. No matter how ingenious, imaginative or artfully put, unless interpretive methodologies are tied to the original intent of the framers, they have no more basis in the Constitution than the latest football scores. To be sure, even the most conscientious effort to adhere to the original intent of the framers of our Constitution is flawed, as all methodologies and human institutions are; but at least originalism has the advantage of being legitimate and, I might add, impartial.

Contrast that with the philosophy The One will be employing when he looks for a Supreme Court nominee.

"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's
like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be
poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria
by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

Or this:

So this is going to be an important issue. I will look for those judges who have
an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a
sense of what real-world folks are going through... I think that it’s important
for judges to understand that if a woman is out there trying to raise a family,
trying to support her family, and is being treated unfairly, then the court has
to stand up, if nobody else will. And that’s the kind of judge that I want.

I don't know how Obama calls himself a constitutional lawyer when he doesn't even believe the constitution deserves consideration in the nominating process. His is the vacuous "living constitution" argument that says the constitution should mean different things depending on the zeitgeist of the time or the political preferences of the judge.

But the constitution is a legal document, a contract that was intended to be interpreted within its four corners. If somethings not there, then it's up to the people and their representatives to decide what to do, not nine lawyers handing down decrees from on high. Obama and his leftist allies take the view that the constitution can mean anything, which is to say it means nothing.

Democrats have been trying to circumvent legislatures and the people through judicial fiat for a while and two or three Obama picks will do that for generations. The country will in time become unrecognizable from that which was originally envisioned and The Bill of Rights, Constitution and The Declaration of Independence will be reduced to quaint museum pieces.