Yes, I am uncomfortable with the notion that rights are merely granted and not inherent. I believe that some rights belong to me because I am a human, not because a government has granted them to me. However, as I mentioned in my post, perhaps a debate over inherent vs granted rights would be better off in another thread.
I understand where you are coming from on this, and believe me, we've been over it before.
I even found the bloody thread!
Basically, Jerome got his backside handed to him. The upshot of it all was that while many posters upheld the concept of right and wrong as absolutes, this was best translated as the proposition that people
should have certain rights. Thus morality and basic human decency would suggest that your society
ought to grant you the right to life, the right to own proprety and so on.
You can't tell a slave that he has the right to liberty, because in a society where slavery is legal, he hasn't. You can, however, declare that slavery is wrong and he
ought to have the right to liberty.
You can't tell a man who is about to be murdered by a felon that he has the right to life, because clearly that is meaningless. You can however declare that he
ought to have the right to life, and do everything you can to ensure that he gets it.
You may declare that the right to life is absolute - but then, how do you deal with capital punishment. You have to concede that the state has a right to remove that right if it sees fit.
And so on. Try reading that thread, from what I remember it was quite instructive.
However, the healthcare issue is simpler if this approach to rights is not followed up. Do you think that people
ought to have the right to healthcare? Depends on a lot of things, perhaps principally on whether the ability exists within the society to deliver the right to healthcare. But given that it does, quite self-evidently, then granting that right is an option open to any government, subject to the agreement of its citizens.
Many people in the US declare that they wish to keep their own money and not be obliged to contribute to the healthcare of others. They see their "right" to their own property as paramount. However, when you get down to the specifics and the detail, these same people also don't want to see poor people with expensive illnesses dying for lack of care. It's a paradox.
It's a paradox that every developed first-world democracy (including the US) has solved by declaring, if you like, mandatory charity. Rather than rely on the voluntary contributions of the well-off to prevent the poor dying of expensive diseases, mandatory contributions are enforced. (Just like they are, even in the US, to fund a whole host of other public goods that nobody would even begin to argue are basic human rights, right down to those library books.) The advantage is that the burden of contributing is not entirely resting on the generous and the philanthropic.
You can't have it both ways. If contributions are not mandated then there is a very high chance that the poor will, in fact, die in the streets. The only way to prevent that is if some philanthropists are prepared to contribute way beyond their proportionate liability, to offset those of a miserly tendency. And that has a whole lot of extra problems we've already discussed.
The big difference is that in the US, this "mandatory charity" only covers the very poor and the elderly. It is not a universal system covering the entire population. And oposition to the principle of "mandatory charity" then leads not in the direction of universal coverage, but of opposition even to that level of provision - as we've seen with Dan.
If you stick with a two-tier system as you have at present, with "mandated charity" (taxes) funding the healthcare of the poor, while the better-off look after themselves, you create many problems. Most obviously, that the better-off cannot access the healthcare system they themselves are paying for - thus resentment and bitterness may ensue. Also, that anyone who falls between the cracks and finds themselves without entitlement, has to reduce themselves to penury before they can access the tax-funded system.
If on the other hand you have a system where everyone is entitled to access the tax-funded system, much of these objections disappear. The well-off may be paying quite a lot - but they are getting benefit from their contributions. The poor are not further disadvantaged by having to settle for a second-class system, constantly squeezed by legislators who don't have to rely on it themselves. And those who fall ill at inconvenient times, such as just after being made redundant from a well-paid job, don't have to spend every penny they have on private medical treatment before becoming eligible for publicly-funded treatment. And it's just the same system as funds those library books, dammit!
I seriously can't see who doesn't benefit from this. Even the rich person who doesn't fall ill (who has therefore paid in a lot more than he has taken out) has the advantage of not having to worry about healthcare, or falling into an impossible healthcare need in the future due to a change in fortune.
To reject all the practical advantages simply because of an ideologically-driven desire not to contribute to a system which will benefit you as much as the next guy, seems to me to be completely perverse.
Rolfe.
). Thanks again.
