Quote of the Day: Why Health Care Is Not a Right

The problem with his statement is that rights aren't the government's to give. John Locke, the 17th century English philosopher, wrote about inalienable rights: God-given rights that can't be taken away. (Agnostics and atheists may prefer to think of these rights as inherent in nature.) Locke considered life, liberty and property to be among such natural rights.

A century later, Thomas Jefferson adopted Locke's definition when he drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence, citing "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as inalienable rights. Government's role is "to secure these Rights," Jefferson wrote, not to create new ones.

The Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, enumerates some of these natural rights: freedom of speech and religion; a free press and free assembly; and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Even more important, the Bill of Rights prohibits Congress from enacting any law interfering with the exercise of these freedoms. (I'll leave the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment's right to bear arms to Constitutional scholars.)

That hasn't stopped Progressives from creating all kinds of new rights: a right to a job, a right to a minimum wage, a right to health care.

These aren't rights as conceived by the Founding Fathers. A right is something we can all exercise simultaneously without imposing a burden on someone else. The only obligation, in fact, is that others not interfere with an individual's exercise of his rights.

That concise concept of rights, sometimes referred to as negative rights, comes from the book, Clichés of Politics, a collection of essays published by the Foundation for Economic Education. It provides a simple basis for determining what constitutes a right.

Many politicians insist on transforming every privilege or benefit or entitlement into a right.

(bold added) 

This excerpt is from an article by mainstream commentator, former Bloomberg analyst, Caroline Baum at EC21.org on first presidential debate of the Democratic Party

Quote of the Day: Distinguishing Property from Wealth

Property is a legal concept, whereas wealth is an economic concept. The two are often confused, but they should be kept quite clearly distinct. The one refers to a set of rights, the other to how people value such rights. The same legal claim to property may yield great wealth today and none tomorrow. Market exchanges change the values of property claims continuously, as Ludwig Lachmann explained clearly in his important essay on “The Market Economy and the Distribution of Wealth.”

This is from Cato Institute’s Tom G. Palmer, in the continuing debate over negative and positive rights at the Cato Unbound

Quote of the Day: Free Migration would be Great for the World

If First World governments simply respected everyone’s right to accept job offers from willing employers, most of the world’s poor wouldn’t need charity. They could take care of themselves. Any able-bodied person living in poverty would be free to sell his labor to the highest bidder in the world. Instead of paying years of income to coyotes, the global poor could migrate for the cost of a bus or boat ticket. Instead of crossing the border in fear to compete for illegal jobs, the global poor could cross the border openly to compete for any job they’re qualified to do.

Wouldn’t this simply drive First World wages down to Third World levels? No. Basic economics tells us that trade barriers don’t just redistribute wealth; they destroy wealth. Confining able-bodied workers to the Third World is like confining agriculture to Antarctica. Standard economic estimates say that open borders would roughly double world output. While trade liberalization never benefits absolutely everyone, free migration would be great for the world and great for the world’s poor.

(italics original)

This is from Professor Bryan Caplan in a debate over “negative and positive rights” at the Cato Unbound

Differentiating Phony Rights from Real Rights

In a letter to a newspaper, Professor David Henderson refutes what the mainstream and leftists call as “rights”

A real right is, say, my right not to be murdered. The only responsibility that imposes on you and others is not to murder me. In other words, it's a responsibility not to do something. The "right" to good housing, though, is a phony right because it implies that someone else has a positive duty to provide it. And let's not hide behind government. The only way government can provide things is by forcibly taking from others.

Except for the preservation of the natural rights to life, liberty, and property, I’d be very leery of anyone claiming for (positive) “rights” (which are disguised grants to state power) as such would extrapolate to more taxes, restriction of civil liberties and inflation.