Ed Brayton, who sometimes describes himself as a libertarian, calls Rush Limbaugh “bankrupt morally” for “actually argu[ing] that having access to health care is no different than having a house on the beach”—by which he is referring to Limbaugh’s view that you have no “right” to health care that you can't afford, and that while it may be unfortunate that poor people are unable to afford health care they would like, they do not have a right to it.
Limbaugh is correct. Health care is no different than a house on the beach, in this context. You have no more right to health care than you have to a house on the beach. To have a right to health care would mean that you have the right to demand that doctors and nurses take care of you, and that other people pay your medical bills for you. In the conversation with Limbaugh, Shatner implies that health care is a “right” because it is important to people's lives—that without it, people suffer. But, of course, without a lot of things, we suffer. That does not mean that we have a right to have suffering alleviated by the services, and out of the paychecks, of others. To make that claim—to say that “where in my view something is really important to alleviating suffering, then people have a right to that thing” is to utterly obliterate the meaning of the term “rights.” Health care, like a house on the beach, is a desirable thing produced by other people. To get that thing, you must work to afford it and trade for it freely. That is the only moral route to obtaining that thing. To assert that you have a right to that thing is, in the end, to demand that other people labor to produce that thing for you regardless of their will, and we have a word for that. Hint: it isn’t “freedom.”
Brayton has claimed in the past to believe in the classical liberal doctrine of natural rights. That position—which he once described as “”each person should be free to do as they please so long as their actions do not harm another person against their will, take away their equal liberties, or rob them of the fruits of their labors. There is no right to murder or to steal within the natural rights framework for the obvious reason that it deprives the rights of others”—is utterly incompatible with the “positive right” assertion that one has a “right” to health care. If there is, in principle, a right to health care, then one has, in principle, the right to compel others to provide it: the right to take money from people’s paychecks to provide it, and the right to compel doctors to furnish it. And if one has a right to “access” whatever one considers important, then that principle would stretch far beyond health care, into a right to whatever the ruling clique considers worthwhile—at your expense and at my expense. It’s sad to see Ed Brayton, who once argued that the military draft and national service violate the Thirteenth Amendment, now call that same position “morally bankrupt.”
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