During the most recent round of health debates, there was a lot of talk about human rights. Bernie Sanders led the charge, often claiming that access to health care should be a basic, inalienable right. For a lawmaker, he seems dangerously ignorant of what a legal right actually is.
Rights vs Entitlements
There’s a lot of negative language around the term “entitlement,” but let’s take a moment to lay out a few key distinctions. Entitlements aren’t inherently bad.
For instance, Social Security (in theory at least) is a way to guarantee that funds devoted to retirement can be reclaimed later in life. Despite being an entitlement plan, its intended funding would still be an appropriate way to achieve a reasonable goal.
A right, on the other hand, would be the freedom of the speech. This right is built into the most important part of the Constitution for the sole purpose of reducing government power. People who can speak freely can arm themselves against propaganda and tyranny. It’s pretty important.
The easy way to distinguish between legal rights and entitlements is money. We’ll get into it more in a minute, but we don’t demand that the government fund all media. In fact, that would be considered a corrupt maneuver. We do expect the government to return money put into Social Security after retirement. Ok. Now that we’ve drawn the easy lines, let’s talk about how the left loves to twist these concepts.
The Modern “Human Rights”
The left has seen how resolutely Republicans fight to maintain intrinsic rights (primarily those in the Constitution), and they are trying to turn that effort on its head. In recent years, you’ve heard the rising noise around “human rights.” These started with reasonable claims a few hundred years ago — namely life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The new additions are living wages, universal health care, and even internet access. The perverse logic suggests that these are necessary components to the pursuit of happiness, despite being concepts that have been around for less than a hundred years. The fact that humanity has been fine without internet access for millennia seems lost on these people, but we’ll still consider the idea properly.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the primary logical fallacy here is that no government agency or societal movement in America is inhibiting these newly claimed rights. Discrimination is already illegal in the workplace, so people have the freedom to earn whatever they are worth.
Likewise, it is against the law for medical providers to deny service based on any form of discrimination. They even have to provide services when they know from the start that recipients can’t pay for the care. Do we really need to take the time to explain that internet access is available to anyone who wants it?
It’s All About Money
This finally brings us to the crux of the issue. The rights for people to access health care and whatever else the liberals are contesting are already protected. It isn’t some esoteric inclusion in the Constitution that is open to interpretation. Redundant laws protect citizens at every level of government for each of these issues. The inevitable conclusion, then is that the left isn’t fighting for rights at all.
Despite trying to mask things with convoluted language, they know the truth of this. Their fights are for money. They want the government to pay for their access to each of these things, despite voluntarily living in a free-market economy.
The truth is not that they need these things to pursue happiness, but rather that they want more things at someone else’s cost. This breaks liberals into two camps: those who understand how taxes work and those who don’t.
Among the millennial progressives, there is a contingent who is simply ignorant. They fail to realize that the government pays for things via taxes, and that money comes from the citizens. Every audit in government history has shown that entitlement programs are always less cost-effective for solving social problems than charitable giving.
If you want less fortunate people to have access to better internet or health care, paying directly out of pocket will always work better than additional government programs. In ignorance, these progressives often want to genuinely help people but lack an effective means to do so.
The rest simply don’t care. When you explain to them that entitlement programs literally rob from one group of Americans to give to another, they are excited by the prospect. This mentality rejects the totality of human history, and it is the most dangerous mindset in the country today.
~American Liberty Report
