Monday, January 04, 2010

It's Official! Rights Come From the Government!

Senator Tom Harkin:
[..] What this bill does is, we finally take that step.  As our leader said, earlier, we take that step from health care as a privilege to health care as an inalienable right of every single American citizen.

 As I've said before, this bill is not complete. I've used the analogy of a starter home on which we can add additions and enhancements as we go into the future. But like every right that we've ever passed for the American people, we revisit it later on to enhance and build on those rights. And we will do that here surely, we will enhance and build on this. But we have made that first and most important step to make it a right rather than a privilege.
Inalienable Rights.

There you have it. Rights now come from the government.   Not self-evidently endowed to us and merely recognized and protected by the government.  "We", (congress) pass rights for the American people.

The Constitution does not matter.  As I've said before, and as Harkin confirms here, it doesn't matter what's in the bill that's being passed today.  It's a foot in the door.  And they know it.

Social Security ... expanded and "enhanced" into bankruptcy.  Medicare, expanded and "enhanced" into bankruptcy.  We've been talking about it for decades now, and pushing the inevitible as far into the future as we can, when it will be catastrphic, but not while I'm running for office.  Fannie.  Freddie.  Guaranteed loans.  Expanded and "enhanced" until people who couldn't afford homes began to default on them in droves.

And we want to start a brand new, huge Federal Entitlement.  Insanity.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of the great failures of the public school system (or great successes if you're a liberal) is that most of the population has thought this for a long time. The government has no more business granting "inalienable rights" than it does defining Good or Evil. I do not have the inalienable right to take the fruit of my neighbor's labor and buy health insurance with it. Neither does he or she have the inalienable right to my bank account.

philmon said...

Eggzactly.

If you have to compel one person to do something in order to fulfill another's "right", it is not a right.

Either we are compelling doctors to give health care to people regardless of whether or not the doctor is compensated, or we are compelling others to compensate the doctor.

Either way, it fails the "rights" test.

Cylar said...

Now, now...there you go getting all specific and logical-like. You can't do that, as it makes their arguments fall to pieces. When you start asking questions like, "Who is going to pay for these 'rights'", well, they don't want to talk about that.