Looming Red

On the eve of the people getting their power back from the state, we hear about compromise with the losers by the winners:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2010/10/issa-defines-compromise-on-top-line.html

The word compromise has more than one meaning. It can mean to make concessions on either side of a debate, true. Another meaning of compromise is to weaken something like a ship or state security. When either side of the argument have some common ground than the concession to get to the common ground fits in the first compromise definition. When both sides are incompatible it is the weakening of the whole. Abraham Lincoln understood this when he decried the expansion of slavery to the new states calling the compromise a house divided.

We are facing a similar division of the house. We are stuck between the side of the founding principles of individual liberty and responsibility and the side of state control and the recession of individual liberty. Where state control is, there individual liberty cannot be also. We need compromise with this unconstrained vision of statist leftists like the Hindenburg needed compromise. We need compromise like the Titanic. We need compromise like Pearl Harbor.

These elitist fools in Washington who go out from our states, supposedly representing us, compromising with that which will corrode the whole have got to go. This is not compromise like Madison compromising in the apportionment in the congress and the senate. This is compromise like a breach in the hull, like static electricity on a hydrogen zeppelin, it is compromise like enemy radio silence before an attack on your whole Pacific naval force.

We are through compromising with socialism, because it is not compromise in the first sense. It is really incremental Marxism. It is the devil with his toe in the door. If compromise is needed to get things done, then it should be pure gridlock. If republicans or any other politicians do that they will be Heroes. If not, they will be unemployed.

There is an outlandishly ridiculous documentary that is taking the world by storm. Wait, I actually had that wrong. It is going totally unnoticed by everyone.

Sure there was media about some of their pranks that they pull, one of which caught some attention when they impersonated the US Chamber of Commerce to announce support for legislation on global warming. This is just about the extent of their fame.

They are like the Jerky Boys of political activism, scheduling fake press conferences and conventions in the name of organizations they have judged to be worthy of their ridicule. Of course the only evil they ever see is stereo-typically corporate evil. One of their big pranks is to impersonate an insurance company giving a lecture on the benefit of “golden skeletons” in the closet. Their hidden cameras only get a fairly mild reaction out of one person praising the lecture. In this meeting of evil corporate types, most of the reactions are from skepticism to contempt for the lecture topic.

This whole documentary is more about these two loser comedians and what lengths they will go to make fools out of themselves. It’s more like a comedy central audition tape than a documentary.

The only part that really got my eyr more than my pity was a part where they try to trace back the “corporate greed” to economist Milton Friedman. I can understand leftists not agreeing with Milton Friedman, but they can never be honest about their disagreement. Friedman was a true liberal, in a classical scottish enlightenment sense. He was a disciple of Adam Smith and believed that greater economic freedom is true freedom. If these two, and other leftists for that matter, were honest they would admit that their disdain for Friedman is that he argued against the state.

In their introduction to Friedman and why they don’t like him, they show two images that represent freedom. One is an African descended slave breaking shackles from his wrists in an arch over his head. The other, representing Friedman’s brand of freedom, is a person in a suit being showered with money. This is the part where these two mildly humorous comedians took on more of a doltish quality.

What is it that made the slave in the first photo not free prior to breaking his shackles? The slave was said to be owned by another person, true. The slave could not travel, marry, or do anything else that the master would not want. But for what purpose? The slave master wanted the slave’s labor without having to pay him or give him any other freedom that would inconvenience the master.

Who is the more common modern slave? and why is he or she not free? If a person has the product of his labor confiscated by manipulative taxation, taxation that will only be alleviated if “proper” behaviors are exhibited, is that person free? If the receipt of the product your labor is withheld from you and goes to another to whom it does not rightfully belong except through the power of the state to tax and coerce compliance, are you not a slave with bronze shackles?

The supposed examples of Friedman’s brand of freedom, in the documentary, are companies like IBM that gave technical support to the NAZI government during Hitlers reign. This technical support earned IBM a “golden skeleton” in their closet, because even though Jews were murdered with their corporate help, they got a lot of money for it. This is where most leftists often get confused.

The NAZI government was merely another off-shoot of Marxism. NAtional ZIosialisten is the full abbreviated name of the NA.ZI. party. They believed that government control of private industry could only be attained, first, by destruction of the maligned middlemen jewish minority and second, by the consolidation of the private industry through regulation and unionization.

They were roughly following “Il Doulche” Benito Mussolini, who believed that communism, while having good and praiseworthy goals of destroying corporate power and subduing the masses, was fundamentally flawed in its approach of trying to own directly the means of production on an international scale. Mussolini received great praise by contemporary progressives during the 20’s and early 30’s for his belief that the same socialist goals could be achieved on a national rather than international scale through government control rather than ownership of the means of production.

That Friedman could be pointed to as an example of big business greed is pure stupidity and/or ignorance. First of all, Friedman disliked large companies like IBM and believed that diverse small business was the preferred result of diverse individual economic freedom. The proof that he was right is in a simple thought experiment.

When government regulates the Vaccine industry to use certain equipment, perform certain types of studies, etc, etc, who is it that can produce with such obstacles? Will it be small chemistry labs with big ideas and slim wallets or will it be politically connected fat cats who will hire for a pittance the big idea chemist with the large corporate legacy wealth? The greater the regulation, the bigger legal compliance departments, the more expensive the production, the bigger the corporation needed to bring e vaccine to market.

Milton Friedman understood the power of the free market to be better way in that instance, because the loss part of the profit and loss free market would discipline the big idea chemist to make a vaccine that did not harm the customer. This is the famous invisible hand at work in the economy of private individuals freely dealing with one another. To represent this with an image of suited man being showered with money is sophistry or stupidity and given who we are talking about, it is probably the latter.

Take the present economy created by the mortgage crisis. The Yes Men would have us believe that it was corporate greed that got us into this mess and only regulation can save us. It may have been corporate greed, but it was also government and political greed. Prior to 2001 there was no such thing as greed, right? Greed is just this recent innovation that we must regulate away.

Obviously, to say that greed is some new innovation is a purposefully absurd point, but it points out the absurdity of the argument that the present circumstance was because of greed. Thomas Sowell, another Hoover institute fellow of Milton Friedman, who has carried the banner for free markets since Friedman’s passing, is fond of making the point that a person could be the greediest person in the world without adding to his fortune another dime. Why? That person needs a vehicle for his greed to benefit him.

The Housing Boom and Bust a bestselling book by professor Sowell points out that government regulation gave the greed of speculators and lenders a vehicle that a free market would not have done. Another thought experiment: if I lend money to people who cannot pay me back over and over again, am I stupid or greedy? What will be the penalty of doing this? In a natural free market scenario that is stupid and will carry the penalty that I would not be in the lending business for long since I will lose all of my seed money, as I should.

When the government charters companies to take the risk off my hands so I only get profit and no loss then coerces me through government fiat to lend to exactly those types of people who can’t afford to pay it back, am I stupid or greedy? Well, probably greedy, but not stupid. I would have been doing exactly what was beneficial for me to do with a broken profit and loss system. When there is loss in the profit and loss system, which Milton Friedman was fond of pointing out, it is exactly those kinds of people who would stop at nothing to make a buck at anther’s expense who lose their power.

I say “lose their power”, because most of us forget why we call it the scottish enlightenment. From what were the scottish academies enlightened? They were part of the emergence from the serfdom of Europe.

It was the Lord who thought the peasant class had not enough sense to manage affairs. The Lords set themselves up as the enlightened and through force coerced the masses tho comply. They set prices, negotiated pay, dictated benefits or work, and on and on. Yes the peasants were ignorant, but they were kept ignorant by the laws and the situation laid down by the Lords. If you were a peasant who did not comply or even just excelled in your production, the Lord would, under authority of a king or queen, confiscate, punish, execute.

It was another Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek, who believed that the more economies move away from a free profit and loss model the more we are on a similar “Road to Serfdom” as he named a very famous book on the subject. With regulation and well-positioned big business using corrupt governments to help kill off their weaker, less-connected competition, how is Hayek wrong? He wasn’t wrong at all.

Go back and read the above paragraphs where I talked about life prior to the Scottish enlightenment and prior to the destruction of feudalism. How much of it parallels or modern society. The “kings” are the elected officials who are empowered by the ignorant masses to create bureaucracies to regulate. The “lords” are the various bureaucratic institutions empowered by the politicians to penalize, manipulate, and dominate those not politically connected. Who are the serfs? We are.

So why do the Yes Men get my ayr so much? Well it is really not them. They are just useful idiots. They really are about as intellectual as the mushrooms with which they recreate. It is the ignorance that gets me angry. Why is it that freedom is the one that is getting such hatred aimed at it by people like the Yes Men? Freedom is the only way out of the serfdom we have all allowed to become our lives.

We are on the cusp of socializing our very bodies. Government controlled healthcare is literally submitting to a far-away bureaucrat the power over your life and death in the arena of healthcare. Once the central government in Washington has the power over your life and you don’t like it or you think it is corrupted, what would you do? You have to beg, but not just about something like public schooling or building good roads. You have to beg for your life.

In terms of classical liberalism versus statism, with federal mandates on healthcare you are beholden to the state. Your life is in the hands of another to grant or not. What if a Stalin-like individual gets into government or the bureaucracies become so large and in-transparent that impersonal life/death decisions are the norm? How do you get back the power that you gave to government in a time when things looked like they’d be different? You are stuck along with your fellow citizens.

Healthcare is expensive as it is and will only get more so. But why is it expensive? Has it always been like this?

Many say that healthcare is expensive because of healthcare insurance companies taking huge profits. So what are their profits? According to Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics, the health insurance industry ranks number 86 in profitable industries, below garbage collection, cleaning products, personal hygiene products, and many other industry categories. The whole health insurance plans industry shows an average profit of 3.3%, less than 4 pennies for every dollar. Yet, healthcare insurance continues to rise at the rate of about 12% on average every year. How does an average profit of 3.3% translate into the cause of 12% yearly increase? It doesn’t.

But why should people profit off of the health of others? Many think even 3.3% is just greed over the misfortune of others. Profit is not greed. If it costs you $600 a month to travel to work, eat during the day, and use up your time to work for your employer, is it greedy to expect more from your employer than $600 in compensation? If you take home $1000 for the job you have a profit of $400, which is a 66% profit.

One might say that an individual’s profit for a job done is different than the profit of a company. How? A person desires profit from their job for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with just living hand to mouth. Even the very poor have things. Was it greedy for them to get more than what they needed to merely live? Well a company must do more than merely live. They have to prepare for the future and they do it through profits. When there is a downturn in the economy, a lack of investors, an epidemic health crisis, or whatever, the only thing standing between you continuing to get insurance through your company and the complete failure of that company is the 3.3% that they had in former years.

Of course governments are never greedy, right? Only people who admit they are out for a profit are greedy, right? Governments are greedy for money and power.

When bureaucrats spend all of the money that they had left in there budgets at the end of the year so that their records show they spent everything, they do so to make sure they are considered for an increase the next year. Spend what you can so you can get more? Is that not greed? It is more greedy than a profitable insurance company. That profitable insurance company can’t simply spend and charge what it likes as the bureaucracy does; it must compete in a market where their competition could exploit their inflated prices. Bureaucracy has no competition in that sense.

A politician may get into office raise spending and do so at the expense of others with out even asking them if they can afford the increase in taxes. That politician may have money in mind when taxes are raised, but for what end? Charity? No, if charity were the goal, then the politician could give funds to charities or even raise no taxes and use his position and popularity to encourage voluntary charity. The statist politician seeks public options, because ultimately those options give the statist politician power.

Perform a thought experiment. Obama says that he wants GM jobs to survive and uses the government loans used to “save” GM as an excuse to commandeer GM shares and property. He does so because he didn’t like the plan that GM had presented on its own to save the company. What was he seeking when taking over 48% of GM shares? He didn’t like what they were doing, thinks his own people and he know better, and therefore seeks control. What is control? Power.

Right now there are about 1300 health insurance companies in the US. Every American can only access those companies in his or her state by federal law. If insurance is too costly in California and not too bad in Wyoming, forget being able to buy insurance in Wyoming unless you move there.

Does it make sense to limit competition like that? If you think that a store in your area is charging too much for computers, you can go online and buy from somewhere else. Insurance is a service that is much more portable than computers. You can pay your premiums online and the company can pay claims across the country. Why would anyone limit your access to a service that can be performed from anywhere? Power. The statist had an opinion about cross-state competition and sought the power to prevent it because the statist wanted control. Statist politicians are greedy for power over others, no matter what else is their motivation.

The question still remains. Why is insurance so expensive?

BIG REASON NUMBER ONE: It isn’t insurance.

Insurance is a prearranged agreement for one person to pay upfront for a promise that the other will pay for greater unforeseen expenses should they occur in the future. Car insurance is insurance in the true sense for the most part. You pay a company and then try your darnedest (if you are smart) not to ever need that company’s service.

Examine the agreement of most health insurance plans. You pay part of the money against some catastrophe that you knock on wood to avoid, but the rest goes to paying for things that you actually expect to pay. It is not out of the norm for a person to see a doctor once a year. It costs you and the insurance company an average of $152 for that visit with the average co-pay share of that being $20. Health insurance costs and average of $13,000 a year and plans that provide for routine visits cost usually two or more times the price of catastrophic only coverage. So rather than pay the $152 out of pocket or savings, you payed someone else more to pay it.

So lets say, as was the case with me when shopping for insurance, you are presented with “Plan A” that only covers catastrophes at about $2100 a year and “Plan B” that covers catastrophes and all kinds of routine things like checkups, prescriptions for any ailment, etc. at a cost of $4200 a year. If I choose Plan B, then I have literally just payed twice as much money for things that I can reasonably expect that I may need to pay for during that year. Will all of the extra $2100 go straight to paying for the doctor visits or drugs? No. A large portion of it will go to pay for billing and other administrative costs by the insurance company, doctors office, and pharmacy. If you can reasonably expect to pay for routine things during the year, why pay someone else to pay them for you? You could have just chosen Plan A and used the saved $2100 during that year to pay directly to the doctor or pharmacist.

Most Americans have chosen Plan B when presented with it, because it sounds nice to not have to worry. That means that we are not paying extra money for healthcare, we are paying extra for worry-care.

BIG REASON NUMBER TWO: People most of the time have no clue how much they were charged.

If you had iTunes insurance that you pooled with 1000 other people that would pay for any possible iTunes expenses, all of the prices for each buy were unknown, there was only a fixed small co-pay for each buy, and you buy all you wanted as long as you had enough for all the small co-pays, what would happen to the price of the iTunes insurance for every participant? What an audiophile may have reasonably spent on straight purchases would increase rapidly and it would do it for every participant in such a ridiculous policy.

That is what we have chosen to do for health insurance. People have no clue how much visits cost, they have no clue how much drugs cost, they have no clue how much administration costs, but they pay it collectively every month in the form of a ridiculous scheme that is really not insurance—it’s concierge payment service. We have decided collectively act like we’re all contestants of Super-Market Sweep Healthcare Edition where the twist of the show is that the host gets to ring up the full baskets.

The excuse for healthcare cost rises is often said to be technological advances. If that is true then how come technological advances mostly cost more in the “I-have-no-clue-how-much-this-is-going-to-cost-me” model? La-sic eye surgery does not have the huge increases in costs that other innovations have even though the technology is better and better and the procedures are relatively new. Plastic surgery has come down from the enormous costs of its early days to where they continue to fall today—this occurring with greater and greater technological advances. However, anything in the “I-have-no-clue” model is more and more expensive.

Where else do we say technology makes things more expensive? Only in government endeavors and healthcare. Harvesting wheat is cheaper with technological advances. Manufacturing cars is cheaper with technological advances. Is it cheaper to have a machine and tech that probe your guts for a blockage or probe the old fashion way by opening you up with a staff of payed medical professionals, rented operating room, rented hospital room, etc, etc? The per-unit cost for a machine is more expensive if all you would ever have is one guy to use it on, but most medical machines are bought to perform on multiple patients. So, is it the technology or the fact that people have no clue of how much they are billed that made it expensive? They have no clue is the answer.

BIG REASON NUMBER THREE: Tort, tort, tort.

What product or service would not be expensive if the providers or sellers were to be shaken down by sharks in suits? If a sandwich shop had to pay half its income paying to protect itself from the occasional mobster coming in to break everyone’s kneecaps, how much would the sandwich cost?

People see former Senator John Edwards running for president with the money he made from suing doctors, nurses, and hospitals for a since disproved cause of cerebral-palsy, and only think he is a scoundrel when he cheats on his sick wife. He is a scoundrel on both counts and probably more.

more to come…

One of the greatest fallacies of the modern era is to use the term of Liberalism to label those whom we call liberal today. I think that we do this, because they themselves claim the appellation of liberal and we simply concede the use. Those on the other side of issues from “liberals” often convert the term to a pejorative to diminish its positive impact. The loss of this term in its original and historic use within the American tradition has been a loss of understanding of the American Ideal of true classical liberalism.

In the classical sense, Liberalism is the rejection of sovereignty in the state in favor of the concept of individual sovereignty in the people. Up until the liberal period in western society, sovereignty was usually vested in a monarch, parliament, or some other state entity. All individuals within the dominion of the sovereign were nothing more than subjects of the sovereign. Their own natural sovereignty was not recognized or granted to them by the sovereign of the state.

Many philosophers and political thinkers began prior to the liberal era to theorize and later declare that all people were born sovereign and that their sovereignty had been commandeered by those in whom state power was then vested. This radical idea was treasonous in many nations and was only theoretical until a state would arise that would challenge the old notions of vested power. The moment that allowed the theory of liberalism to become practice arrived in an attempt of colonists subject to a distant power to retain liberty that had only been obtained by accident on the part of the host state.

The British crown at the time of the American revolution may have been under the authority of a liberal constitution established in the Cromwell rebellion, but it never gave the people living in the homeland of the empire the kind of individual sovereignty that the colonists enjoyed only through the inability of the crown to restrict them across the Atlantic. When the restrictive power of the crown increased through the expansive influence and power of the growing British empire, the American colonists would not concede the liberty they came to appreciate was theirs.

The declaration of independence and later the constitution named a liberty that had already been part of the American tradition. Subsequent movements of abolitionism of slavery and reconciliation with the native populations with time bore fruit. The journey had been hard and bloody.

Growing along side the expansion of true classical liberalism, modern “liberalism” also grew. It has always been mislabeled, because it has nothing to do with the liberation of individual sovereignty. In fact, the liberal acceptance and experimentation of anything counter to normative culture often pursues expansion of the state in its favor. One can see that liberals so called are neither liberal nor open-minded. They are only counter-cultural and permissive of anything counter-cultural. They are illiberal.

Illiberalism, if further named could be called permissivism. Permissivism is a term that must be used, because it explains it all. If you would like to permit abortion, the left is your ally. Want to have gay marriage, the left is your ally. Activist courts, Czars instead constitutionally reviewed cabinet members, money confiscated from one citizen to give to another, expansive administrative bureaucracies bound by no one and no constitution, indoctrination in schools, state-sponsered healthcare, and on and on. The ideology of permitting anything as long as it is new, expansive, and will solidify your life statement of not being like your parents is the leftist’s ideology.

When Mussolini first became an international political figure, he was celebrated for his new ideas. Socialism was stale and unworkable to many leftists. After all, the government must take over all industry for it to work. The political and logistical implications of such an implementation were seen by many un-constrained permissives as impossible or at least improbably executable. Mussolini’s idea of simply regulating businesses into large corporate entities that would be easier to infiltrate, influence, or bully was so much more practical.

Mussolini himself was a died-in-wool socialist from birth getting even his given name, Benito, from the mexican socialist revolutionary Benito Juarez. Benito Mussolini was lionized in American and western culture for brief time as his ideas were fresh and had not yet been carried to their only conclusions. It was the permissives that called themselves progressives that simply loved these new and unusual ideas.

There is a bill coming out of congress that purports to help with the healthcare situation in the country. About this bill, Senator Jim DeMint stated, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Well I say that it is either his Waterloo or the Waterloo of our American freedom.

As an aspiring independent person, I would like to go in to business for myself. There are many reasons for me to do this; I think that I have unique talent for what I do, I am tired of working for people who do not have my family interests in mind, and I love the free market in healthcare benefits. Right now the freest healthcare market is in the individual policy market. The inequalities in that market are more due to the employer-coverage dominance and government regulation than due to “evil insurance” providers.

Right now, if I want to get an HSA and Catastrophe coverage I can do so with a variety of providers. No employer or government can say no to me. This is because my state has elected to be liberal in the classic sense regarding healthcare administration. Other states have chosen to hurt themselves on this issue.

On page 16 and 17 of this healthcare bill, I have learned that freest market in healthcare will disappear. It clearly states that only current policies can be held and new policies will not be allowed. Despite the fact that this takes away liberty from me that government has no right to take, the result is bad as well. Those policies held prior to the law will discontinue as providers will withdraw and I will be left with only the government as an option.

I will not be sold on promises of great government care. Even though I do not trust these promises coming out on this bill, there is more to it than results for me. This is a question of rights. The government has no right to take from me the choices that God and nature grant me. This goes to the very heart of this nation’s founding.

Many will argue that liberties have already disappeared on this matter, because of prior laws and the monopolization of HMOs, etc. This scenario that has lead us to the precipice of this loss of liberty is entirely of government making. It was not a conspiracy, but what economist Thomas Sowell calls a “Conflict of Visions”. My vision and that of the founding fathers is a constrained vision: aggregate Human nature is fixed, but predictable. People are prone to corruption, waste, and abuse when granted power over others.

The “Un-Constrained Vision” that is the opposite, points to a false malleability over aggregate human nature. Human nature is only malleable, in my view and the view of our founding, on the individual level and this only in humility not unearned power. This bill is unearned power to unconstrained government. The results: withdrawal of former promises made to the old (cut backs in Medicare with no free replacement), high taxes to all brackets in the form of income taxes and “fees” that amount to the same thing, loss of liberty which is enough for me to not support this bill, and many many more negatives.

This is the waterloo of the American experiment. Fore, a loss of liberty on this issue will allow losses in so many areas and not just the atrocious loss in the area of provider choice alone. This will mean that any law that can be interpreted to lower “public healthcare costs” will be justified no matter what the loss of liberty.

This is our battle of the bulge for the independence of human freedom. Which Senators and Congressmen will be our Patton on this matter?

What we need:

• Freedom in choice at all costs (employers offering a policy must also offer a cash alternative with the same tax-protection)
• Freedom of group benefits outside of employer benefits (companies and individuals may pool risk as they choose)
• Expansion of HSA options (any bank may offer them and any plan may be coupled with them)
• Healthcare regulation be returned to its constitutional regulators in accordance with the 10th amendment (to the states and the people respectively)
• State providence of risk-pooling conditions for those un-coverable by regular market coverage (pre-existing conditions)
• Abolition of federal mandates on “concierge coverage” (3rd party payment of regular expenses that could just be payed by HSA money rather than through mounting higher premiums)

Liberty is the key here! Liberty is our heritage and Liberty is our solution. Let the virtue of the people be the solution and let them live or die by it.

In the declaration of Independence Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness are discussed as immutable and natural rights that are equal to all. These rights that cannot be taken away by any government are the rationale to throw off oppressive government.

Sadly the concept of rights has been lost among many Americans to the exclusion of the essential and basic rights. In our pursuit of a right to a home, we give up our liberty to keep what we earn as government moves to repair the damage of giving others the means to a home. We lose life at the most innocent level to have the right to choose well after the choice of abstinence was already declined. Over and over again we give more ground on the declaration’s basic rights of human individual sovereignty to allow for some marginal right.

But are these marginal “rights” actually defined properly as rights. The term right is where the deception and confusion lie. It is easy to understand the pursuit concept of the right to pursue happiness, because pursuit is defined easily as a personal endeavor. So, even though we often don’t understand happiness as understood by the signers of the declaration and as understood by Jefferson, we can understand that it is up to us to achieve it. Life and Liberty are as difficult to define as Happiness, but even more difficult to understand with a faulty definition of a right.

Take the right to Life in the declaration. Who grants life? We have a right to live and none can take from us our life without trespassing the natural law of human rights to it. Still, who grants to us the right to live? Is there a resulting government agency in charge of assuring that the right be granted? We do not receive food by assurance, birth quotas by mandate, or any other aspect of the granting of life. On the issue of life, government has only been commissioned to punish the seizure of life from one by another, but it does not grant the means of creation and maintenance of life.

Look at Liberty. Government must prevent the seizure of liberty from one to another without due process and just cause. It does not, however, enforce that one take liberty. If you may but will not choose to do something for yourself, government does not enforce that you take liberty and choose it and all other things. It would cease to be liberty and become merely diversity. It would be absurd to suggest.

Yet, it is this definition of right that we talk of marginal rights. You have a right to choose, so the means of the choice must be provided. You have a right to life, so you must wear your seatbelt. You have a right to work, so a job must be provided. You have a right to a home, so it must be provided. You have a right to transportation, so it must be provided. You have a right to education, so it must be provided. You have a right to health care, so health care must be provided and you must choose it.

Forget arguing whether each is a right or not, it is the definition of right that is faulty. It is not a definition in line with the American concept of rights as in our founding. It is a definition not inline with history beyond our culture. The sly definition of right in modern times means a providence and not pursuance. Providence and pursuance are mutually exclusive—unless one means that I need to pursue the providence of others. If I must pursue the providence of others than how is it a natural right?

I can pursue the retention or liberation of rights as the founders did in the revolutionary war or as the Union did for the slaves of the south or as Moses did by the hand of God. But I cannot call it a right that I have to request providence of it from another. It would not be a right; it would be a concession.

If we have a right to health care and then it must be provided, by whom is it provided. It is conceded by a politician and provided by the confiscated result of another’s labor through his or her taxes and the loss of the value of his or her savings through inflation as the inevitable debt is monetized.

So, the virtue of the “right” to health care is to exclude the natural true rights of our founding. Life may be rationed by bureaucracy. Its pursuit may be thwarted by shifting one’s resources by force. Liberty is traded for the providence of the “right”. If you want of get it yourself or don’t want it, you have no choice. If your pursuit of happiness leads you to risky behavior or to a trade-off of security for some other desired goal, you cannot choose it when providence of another “right” is forced. You have no liberty to choose to be charitable when your labor is confiscated to the concession of another’s “rights”. Your family’s life, liberty, and happiness are at stake when your wealth is confiscated irrespective of your needs.

We must reject any form of involuntary health care, provided health care, and the naming of it as a right under the fallacious definition. Rights are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness among others, by they are up to us to achieve and up to government to assure. A “right” defined differently excludes our true rights and is oppression.