All our previous rights havent cost money - liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc. Why is living as long as technologically possible now a "right" and not a luxury? And why does it trump all our other rights? i.e., your liberty is impinged as youre forced to pay for other peoples healthcare.
Health care is not a right, but it's something that has objective value to people and something that, as a civilized society we'd like to be able to provide for everyone.
If we took individual rights to extremes as you suggest, which means real laissez-faire capitalism, the end result would be that a small percentage of the populace would be wealthy while the majority would be poor. People might still have
de jure (under law) freedom and
de jure rights but they wouldn't have
de facto (actual, in reality) freedom and rights--just lip service about it.
And that's the problem with taking individual rights to the extreme--rational men have legitimate conflicts of interest with one another and the amount of resources on the planet (arable land, fresh water, etc.) is finite and limited. So, ironically, in the quest to protect individual rights and to forbid the initiation of physical force, the end result could be an actual reduction in freedom.
Funny thing about health care is that real socialized medicine as it is practiced in the evil excrement-grubbing socialist people's states of Western Europe has proven to be far, far superior to what we have in the U.S. and much less expensive. For a much smaller percentage of their nations' GDP (and in absolute dollars) those evil people's states have 100% coverage, zero medical bankruptcies, a much more content populace, and their businesses and economy are not burdened by health care concerns.
I hope that you will question what may be your belief that individual rights are absolutes and that real laissez-faire capitalism is the ideal. Question the dogma that (Ayn Rand perhaps?) taught you.
Not really looking to rehash the healthcare debate... i'm just wondering about the moral/ethical shift that created this mindset. How'd we get here?
Basically, people don't want to watch other people die in the streets. More intellectual people might realize that we can maximize freedom and well-being with a little bit of socialism and that reality and the fact that resources only exist in finite quantities place constraints on people and society.
In other words, advocating individual rights sounds good and right in theory. However, in actuality, in the real world, it just doesn't work that well, at least not if your goal is to have widespread economic prosperity and de facto freedom. In other words, if you are homeless, starving, and sick, what good are your individual rights doing for you? If 95% of the populace were impoverished and lacked freedom of movement (since all roads would be for-profit and privatized), what good would their individual rights be doing for them?
Check your premises and question the free market dogma. Just because one might claim that his beliefs are objective and based on reason does not necessarily make it so.
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