Our Rights are Threatened by All These New Rights
November 13, 2009, 10:20 am
I have shared before the main problem with all these new fake “rights” (e.g. right to healthcare, right to a job, etc.). Our original Constitutional rights were merely checks on government – they said the government could not pass laws to prevent us from doing certain things or invade our homes without some sort of due process, etc. But these new rights require that some previously free individual be coerced into providing money or labor or both to supply others with these new rights. I often use the desert island test – if you can’t have the right alone on a desert island, its not a right.
But what I had not realized until recently is that many of these new fake rights also share in common a level of compulsion on the beneficiary (not just the payer and provider). For example, you have the right to bear arms and engage in free speech, but you are not required to own a gun or speak in public. But you will be required to use, and pay for, your new “right” to health care, at the threat of a term in prison. In this light, its doubly perverse to call something like health care a “right.” How can something which government uses compulsion on the payers, the providers, and the users be associated with so clean and moral a notion as a “right.” Freedom of religion is a right. Health care is a want.
I got to thinking about this even more with “the right to a job at a fair wage,” embodied in such laws as the Fair Labor Standards Act. Proponents of such a right would consider it a victory that employers have been compelled to not pay less than $7.25 an hour for labor. But the beneficiary is the subject of compulsion as well. This law also means that I cannot sell my labor at less than $7.25, even if I am willing (even eager) to do so. This means that if my choices are to sell my labor at $6.00 or for nothing, the government compels me to be unemployed. My son is 16 and would like a retail job, preferably around books this summer. Having real job experience and customer contact experience, for him at his age, is worth enough that he would likely work for free. But he can’t work for free, because the Fair Labor Standards Act only allows compensation to be valued in monetary terms – non-monetary benefits like skills improvements don’t count. So, given the economy, my son will likely not work next summer. All for his own good, of course.
coyoteblog.com |
