re: #220 lostlakehiker

Well, health care is not a “right” any more than food, clothing, or shelter are rights. The word “right” has to do with what the government may not take from you, not what the government must give to you.

Health care, by law, is now an entitlement. That means that everybody gets it out of somebody else’s taxes until such time as the machinery of taxing and spending fails. As in Greece, now. As in the pipeline to fail, in the rest of the welfare-state world.

Libert’e, egalite, fraternite. Fine. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, check. To be secure in your habitation against unreasonable searches and seizures. To not have troops quartered on you. To speak…These are rights.

Nobody has to be taxed so that you can enjoy these rights. But rights to somebody else’s labor are not rights. They are more nearly encroachments upon his rights, dressed up in the language of rights. At best, they are analogous to conscription, an instance of compelling people to contribute to the common good because that common good must be secured and the free-rider problem makes it impossible to secure by voluntary means. By that analogy, the law can be argued to be constitutional. It’s a permissible exercise of government authority, if that interpretation holds up. It probably will, so we who objected must submit.

But please, don’t tell me that your rights include the right to make some third party pay for your health care. You’ve won the political fight. You can compel it. You will compel it. The losers, the young and healthy, will take the hit and then manage somehow to make ends meet with what’s left them after paying this new tax. Gloating is less unseemly than dressing up this political victory as some step in the saga that included Exodus and the Emancipation Proclamation.

And the IRS is unconstitutional, too!

Good luck with that.