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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Terry Maloney who wrote (224989)	2/5/2022 8:34:55 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 354756

which is of course not particularly conducive to any notion of a commonwealth I would think that a commonwealth could operate with or without positive rights if the parties were in concert regarding the path. The problem comes when the sides diverge on something so fundamental. Historically our laws have not required us to help each other out. Assistance has always been socially encouraged, even morally expected, but legally voluntary. If your neighbor's power goes out in a snow storm, the decent thing for you to do would be to take them in but they have no legal right nor have you a legal obligation for support. Welfare benefits enacted thus far are called entitlements, not rights. I don't think that the advocates of a right to health care or any other positive right appreciate the conceptual wall, or gulf, that exists between the status quo and according positive rights when they casually and cavalierly declare health care to be a positive right, meaning that other people are obligated to pay for it. People generally don't think in terms of abstractions. It's easy to see someone who can't afford health care in a rich country and casually drift into to the notion that the government, meaning the rest of us, should pay for it, and then, even further, that the person has an absolute right to said healthcare. People predisposed to that IMO are overlooking that we have long lived under the notion that there is no such right nor corresponding obligation, that that is the default. According any positive right, as such, would be a huge paradigm shift. There are two problems that I see with failure of universal health care advocates to recognize and deal with that default. One is that it's hard to persuade others to get on board if you don't appreciate where they are coming from, the precedent you are setting, and the depth of that precedent, so the effort is less likely to be successful any time soon. The opposite problem is winning through brute political force without understanding the magnitude of the change and potential unanticipated and unintended consequences of such a paradigm shift and risking eventual consequences. I'm not trying to engage anything here. This subject is mostly off topic and way too heavy. It's just something I've thought a lot about over the years and the topic was triggered the other day. Recording my thoughts is my way of giving my brain temporary closure and setting the once again aside.