Sweden recently made broadband internet access a right, if I heard that correctly. It sounds weird and foreign to us, and might not make total sense if you break it down, but it seems to work for them.
I think the way a lot of other countries look at their relationship with government is more like “we elect you chumps, we pay your salary, so DO SOMETHING.” And taxes aren’t seen as ZOMGEEEEV1L!!! like they are here, because they’re saying what they want for their money, and getting it.
Europe, in general, has suffered a full cycle of capitalist expansion culminating in two world wars. We, OTH, just recently rid ourselves of slaves and indigenous Americans and still have much to learn.
adhay, you are clearly far too consumed with your one-track “corporations are the source of all evil” philosophy to be able to discuss issues like this rationally. Your last message was essentially a paranoid rant devoid of any useful content whatsoever.
Do you actually believe that the entire rest of the world is** still **feudal? :rolleyes: Or that modern social-democratic Europe is feudal? Or modern capitalist England since, say, the Glorious Revolution? None of what you describe is the least bit unique to the USA nor does it have any conflict with a welfare state & popular gov’t.
The Second Amendment does not perceive government as monolithic nor does it recommend non-interference by state actors in the security of the populace. Local governments have every right to issue guns to their populaces entire & to conscript them into a militia. (Actually, they may not have that right now, but under a strict reading of the Second they would.) Even the feds can have an army & navy.
So if we treat health care as parallel to gun rights, then states & localities can build public hospitals, or social insurance schemes, if they so choose. And so can the federal government.
In a sense, we’re all now in a school without recess.
However, 69 yo. Almost straight A’s, K-12, class of '59 in an award winning public school system, K-8 in an award winning Episcopal church Sunday School followed by 4 years in its award winning Boys Choir. Then I dropped out after two years in an award winning men’s college. Worked from the time I was 12, paid cash for my first car (parents paid the insurance first time around) and was an Eagle Scout. Fuck.Me.Running.
A slight misunderstanding of my hypothesis, I opine.
If you go back to the OP, I’m quite happy with the medical treatment I’ve received from the USG. Cancer diagnosed and excised for $20 including a $5 co pay for some delightful pain management, courtesy of Big Pharma. Stylin’ here. I recommend retirement.
Of course. No one’s stopping the government from building a hospital and offering services. No one’s stopping the government from having a ‘free handgun night’.
The question is whether the government has the right to force doctors and nurses to work in it, in order to satisfy someone else’s ‘right’ to health care, or whether someone’s lack of health care gives them the ‘right’ to have the government forcibly confiscate someone else’s wealth to pay for it.
You are misunderstanding emacknight’s point. He was NOT advocating that the government owes him a gun under specific circumstances. He was using that as an example of something acknowledged as a right, and showing that the logic of saying health care is a right that requires someone else to pay for it if I can’t is analogous to saying that the government owes me a gun if I can’t afford it. It is a reductio ad absurdem argument.
I can only plead having been carried away by a metaphor C.S. Lewis used in his preface (1961) to a revised edition of the Screwtape Letters where he likened Hell to a place run from
I think you’re misunderstanding what UHC means, because that’s where the comparison collapses. UHC by definition means that health care will have to be provided for some who can’t afford it. That’s not analogous to the second amendment.