Theoretically, there are two kinds of govt, popular and feudal.
A popular govt is designed from the ground up to protect the weak and powerless (say, 90% of population) from the historic criminal predations of wealth which are sure to continue if left unrestrained. Our Anglo-American Civil War was putatively about this.
Feudalism, OTH, insures that the “haves and the have-mores” (GWB) are not threatened by the multitudes of withouts. It should be clear from James Madison’s thoughts on the matter,
that our Constitution is simply a legalization of feudalism cloaked in the guise of a popular republic.
But let’s suppose we really were a nation, “of, by and for the people”, and really had a say in what our govt does in our name and how it treats its citizens and visitors.
I think that UHC and, while we’re at it, more generous foreign and immigration policies would be givens.
This is absurd. The USA is a unique land of opportunity.
Anyone, and I mean anyone, can file the forms with the state and city to start a business. You can create a corporation or a Limited Liability Company. When you file those papers, the state government officials do not ask you what family you come from or what title or nobility your father has. Now that you have your shiny new company, you are free to pay yourself whatever you think you’re worth.
If you choose not to not deal with the hassle with owning a company, you are free to find employment with anybody who finds your skills valuable. You are not bound to the land or indentured the particular city you happen to be born in. You do not have to explain to your next employer if you are bound by an oath of allegiance to your previous lord. You can work as salaried, join a union, or freelance.
Whether or not UHC should be a right is debatable*. The reasons given in the OP are laughable. The US Constitution = Feudalism? That’s “clear”? I think you missed a few steps in your reasoning…
And, btw, we just did that a few months ago in this thread.
I don’t get it, what’s so unique about it? Is there another meaning of unique that I’m unaware of? Or did you misspell eunuch?
Why is it this statement is ONLY made about health care? The second amendment to the constitution provides a right to keep and bear arms. By your logic, that means I can demand a free gun should I not be able to afford one.
If someone posted that “gun ownership should be recognized as a fundamental birthright,” would you reply with, “no it shouldn’t, that would mean the Government could take the guns I earned and give them to people who didn’t earn them.”
No. You make it sound as if this is simply a matter of opinion. You need to flesh out that argument, since it seems to be central to your thesis, and it is not at all clear why you think it’s true.
No. Your argument has no basis in reality, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of the subject could tell you.
In order to satisfy their obligations under the Second Amendment, the government does not have to do anything. You are the only person who is pretending it is supposed to require action on the government’s part to give you a gun. The government doesn’t have to help, it just has to get out of the way.
On the other hand, there’s no such thing as universal health care that doesn’t create this kind of obligation. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be universal. Adhay is not arguing that the rest of society should not stand in the way of his attempts to get treatment for his illnesses, he’s suggesting that they should be required to give him their services even if he can’t do anything for them in return.
He really makes it sound like a fundamental birthright entitles me to something. Which is why he’s being so selective and cautious about what he allows to be a right.
I think you put a of words in Adhay’s mouth.
The government does a lot to stand in the way of his attempts to get treatment, and thereby grants feudal power to a select few. Consider this:
I am not free to buy the prescription medications I want. They have to be allowed by the FDA. Their manufacture is protected by copyright law. They are controlled by pharmacies (as licensed by the government). And to get permission I have to go to a doctor, licensed by the government, which required going to a medical school approved by the government.
If we made health care a right, the way gun ownership is a right, I’d be able to go to a health show and buy the things I need to protect me and my family, without government intrusion.
Given the low cost and high availability of firearms, making health care a right seems like a great idea.
Pretty tortured comparison there. I understand what the second amendment protects, and I would not assume it means the government owes me a gun. As with all true rights, the second amendment describes a “passive right”; to enjoy it, I need only be left alone. Not so if UHC is a right. For all to enjoy the benefit of it, there needs to be some active step taken by others. For at least some citizens, it will have to be provided.
Do you think otherwise? If I am uninsured, has my right been violated? Who has violated it?
ETA: Grumman, I agree with all your posts in the thread. UHC means something. We’re not responding to some phantom notion.
While I tend to lean toward this way of thinking, theoretically , I don’t know about the “true rights” part. There are different theories about what is a right and what is not a right. In the end, a “right” is whatever we, as a society, decide what a right is.
No you shouldn’t. Why do you think that a right conferred permits someone to exercise it at someone else’s literal expense? If you have the means to purchase a weapon, you may keep it. If not, you still retain the right to keep it should you ever get the means to obtain a weapon.
The First Amendment: your right to free speech does not require a newspaperman to print your opinion at his expense. Your right to assembly does not require the government or anybody else to shoulder the costs of your exercise of that right.
Even if the Constitution provides for UHC under Article I, Section 8 under the “general welfare” provision (or whatever other justification you come up with), unless a tax is levied you have no right to exercise your rights at my expense. A right is not a guarantee that you are able to exercise it, it’s a guarantee that you may exercise it if you are able. There’s a difference.
Second dot to connect. Jefferson’s first draft our Declaration of Independence read, “life, liberty and the pursuit of property”, too obviously feudalistic to go down with the common man. The nebulous term “happiness” left some aspiration room for unpropertied white males and was little more in keeping with the myth of our so-called revolution which as I noted in the OP was really a civil war over who would play tax man and benefit from the exploitation of a virgin continent. Shay’s Rebellion decided the issue.
However, the Founding Fathers would be aghast at the Corporate Kleptocracy America has become. After all, their real argument was with the British East India Company and the power that large accumulations of capital have to corrupt. That’s why, until after our Civil War (another misnomer, it should be called The Northern Industrial Coup), corporations were very tightly regulated and they certainly were not considered persons with Bill of Rights protection.
Yes, that’s just my opinion. Clearly there are folks in this country who see rights and entitlements everywhere they look. But I do think it’s pretty axiomatic. How can I have the right to something that someone else must provide? Who has to provide it? For me, all true rights are some form of the right to be left alone. We may install other things as social policy because it serves some greater purpose, but that doesn’t make it a right.
I use the “desert island” test. If a few people were shipwrecked on a desert island, they’d have the same rights they had before, and they could be violated in the same ways. On my desert island, if someone has cancer, are his rights being violated because he doesn’t get chemo? Who is violating that right if that’s the case?
Strato: I agree with all of that. I just wouldn’t use the term “true”, especially not in a forum such as this. Axioms are assumptions, not truth. We derive true statements from our axioms, but the axioms themselves aren’t true.
Quite so, and the point of the OP. I present as given that what is “right” is decided by who has the bucks. The corporate feudalism into which this country has evolved has devolved into the idea of the people’s choice into preferences in toothpaste.
But the OP really poses the question of what OUR society would look like had we taken to heart what many slave owners in the early “republic” recognized, that a well-fed, healthy slave with adequate time off for recreation was good business.
You think the right to own property defines feudalism?
Before you go any further with this, I suggest spending a little time with an encyclopedia and educating yourself as to what these terms mean.
Jefferson’s first draft could be read like this:
Everyone has a right to life, meaning that you should be secure in your person from the government sacrificing your life for its own ends.
everyone has the right to liberty - freedom to chose their own actions, so long as they don’t violate the fundamental rights of others.
Everyone has the right to pursue property, meaning that you are free to spend the fruits of your own labor on things for yourself, and that no one has a right to take them away from you in pursuit of their own goals - including the government.
The text was changed because it was too materialistic, not because it was feudalistic. Freedom does not necessarily devolve down to the pursuit of property - it can be the freedom to take a vow of poverty, for example. Or freedom to starve yourself to death in pursuit of a philosophical or political goal. So the text was changed to be the ‘pursuit of happiness’, which is just another way of saying that you do not need to justify your motives to anyone. You are free to act in ways that you wish, regardless of what other people think, so long as you do not infringe on the rights of others to do the same.
You can never have a ‘right’ which involves taking away the same right from someone else. A ‘right’ to health care means that someone else must be forced to provide it to you, which would then violate their rights. And since health services are scarce, every time you exercise your ‘right’ to free health care, you prevent someone else from exercising theirs.
Let’s say you have a heart defect, and you need a transplant. So do 20 other people, but there are only 10 hearts available. Whose right gets trampled? What happens to your ‘right’ to UHC if there aren’t enough doctors and nurses?
If you live in a town with one doctor, does he have the right to retire? If so, what happens to your right for UHC?
Universal health care is at best a social aspiration. When a society gets wealthy enough, it may decide that it can afford to be magnanimous and start looking after the people who cannot afford their own health care. It does this out of charity, and out of an interest in maintaining social order and a functional civil society, just as it does with other social programs. I support limited welfare and a form of universal health insurance for these reasons.
It is critically important, however, to maintain an understanding of the fact that these programs are charitable and not a right, lest people come to believe that they have no need to attempt to pay for their own care or in other ways support themselves in life. You want people who get free health coverage to be grateful - not resentful because it’s not more than it is. The ‘entitlement’ mentality is tragically destructive, and leads to class warfare and a breakdown of civil society - the opposite of what we want to achieve with social programs.
