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...

Black Education: Hard Times at Douglass High

From Walter Williams:


"Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement."

Dumb Environment Predictions

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run
out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum,
copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The
Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50 percent of the world's resources
and "by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them." In
1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we
know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000."
Harvard University biologist
George Wald in 1970 warned, "... civilization will end within 15 or 30 years
unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." That was the
same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 "...
somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be
extinct." More...

But this time the enviro's global warming crystal ball is working just fine. Yeah. And monkeys are going to fly out of my butt.