Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders and many others in the Democratic party believe that healthcare is a human right. In the Democratic Debate, Cory Booker stated that “Healthcare is not just a human right, it should be an American right.”
I would suggest to you that if healthcare is a human right, then, more importantly, food, clothing, and shelter (housing) would or should also be human rights. They are not, i.e. as individuals, most of us must bargain and pay for our food, clothing, and housing. As our Founders put it in the Declaration of Independence, we have the “unalienable” right to pursue “Happiness.” Therefore, we have the right to pursue or bargain and pay for food, clothing, housing, and, you guessed it, healthcare!
If human rights included the right to food, clothing, housing, and healthcare, other individuals would have to be enslaved to directly provide these benefits to everyone; or, pay others to provide such benefits. If this were the case, then these legislated human rights become what is known as positive rights, which result in the enslavement of some human beings for the benefit of other human beings. Legislated positive rights are unconstitutional based upon the U.S. Constitution handed down to us by the Founding Generation. The reason positive rights are unconstitutional is because such rights enslave certain groups of people in order to provide those benefits to other groups of people, which is specifically prohibited under Amendment XIII, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
The only rights we have, as a free people, are negative rights, which are delineated in the Bill of Rights or the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. For example, under Amendment I, we have the right to a free press, free speech, and freedom of religion; and Amendment II says we have the right to keep and bear arms. These rights do not require anyone else to be enslaved to provide them to us; therefore, they are negative rights that fall under our “unalienable Rights . . . [to] Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
The problems and high cost of health care, as with most of our other economic problems, have nothing to do with capitalism and the free market. They have to do with government involvement or interference in the market, to include the Medicaid and Medicare Programs, excessive taxation & regulation, restrictions, licensing, and political-crony capitalism throughout the entire healthcare and insurance industries, to include hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical & nursing schools.
The solution to our problems is to get government out of the way by not electing people to public office that want to control our lives, raise our taxes, increase regulations, and, unwittingly, turn us into another Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela. These Democratic Presidential candidates, along with many members of Congress, believe they can create a Utopian environment with a preponderance of socialistic policies, which they realize must infringe on individual freedom in order to implement their programs. However, they avoid mentioning the fact that such socialistic policies can only be put in place by coercion or force; and, by restricting individual freedom.
Under socialist regimes, the political class live like Kings, while the rest of us end up standing in long lines for basic necessities. As Margaret Thatcher once put it, under socialism, eventually you run out of other people’s money.
Look at the devastation that has occurred in many of our formerly great cities in the United States; just to name a few, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, East St. Louis and San Francisco; all run into the ground by Democratic politicians.
Many Republicans aren’t much better, but, our chances of a continued reduction of regulations and taxes between 2021 and 2024, which results in more freedom and prosperity for everyone, are significantly enhanced by the re-election of President Trump and control of both houses by Republicans.
Dum Spiro Spero—While I breathe, I hope,
Robert G. Beard Jr., C.P.A., C.G.M.A., J.D., LL.M.
