Health Care is not a Natural Right

In the post Right to an Undefined Term I pointed out that what constitutes our notion of health care changes with each generation.

It is absurd to claim something that changes with fashion is a right.

After writing the post, the idea jumped into my mind: "Rights come from God."

I would be a fool to write such an apocryphal sentence in my blog. So I changed the statement to "Rights come from nature," with nature being the unchanging essence of man.

The conclusion is the same. A true right comes from our unchanging nature and not passing fashion.

This constantly changing thing called health care is really just people providing a service to other people. It comes from people and changes with time. The health care reform bill sets up an unelected bureaucracy to dictate the health fashions of the day.

We know this because people's concept of good health care is different today than it was fifty years ago.

Health care fashions will have changed 50 years into the future.

Even though our nation's founders were prone to use the politically incorrect term "God" in their musings, I often get the feeling that they were reasoning at a much deep level than the shallow image-based musings at the heart of progressivism.

Yes, an image driven culture can control the people through branding and propagandistic efforts. The partisan media and schools gain control by projecting positive images on friends and negative images on enemies.

Al Franken, Will Ferrell and the Saturday Night Live Crew get off on their ability to control people by controlling the images they pipe into people's brains.

Yawn.

I suspect that the Founders held more to the classical idea of God being the God of Nature from which all thrngs arise. I doubt they saw God as the cartoon caricature that atheists project on religious thought.

I have no problem dismissing the caricature, but in dismissing the caricature one also dismisses the deeper, unchanging concepts that sit at the heart of Classical Liberalism.

It is only by having an abstract entity from which rights flow that one can have inalienable rights. In the various colonial efforts to create bills of rights, early Americans appeared to have been driven by the notion that it is possible to find rights true to the unchanging nature of man.

While it is fun to ridicule the different caricatures people may hold in their minds about God, I worry that the wholesale onslaught to remove all aspects of thoughts of God from public discourse has the dangerous effect of destroying the concept that there is a source from which our inalienable rights flow.

As our schools and intellectual leaders destroy the source of inalienable rights, they destroy the rights themselves and we are left with nothing but fashion.

Progressives smirk with cleverness as they systematically change the foundation of the United States from a foundation of inalienable rights coming from God to one of fashion trends defined by a mysterious unelected elite.

Unfortunately, these progressives appear to be doing little beyond destroying the concept of freedom which led so many to prosperity.

When progressives have completed this game of confusing fashions created by man with rights coming from the God of Nature, they will find the quaint notions of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, trial by jury, etc.. to be dismissed by the ruling elite as simply failed fashions of deeply flawed individuals of the past.

Modern progressivism seems to nothing but different reflections on Hegel's dictum that "freedom is slavery and slavery freedom. To be free one must seek slavery."

As progressives demand that we surrender our inalienable rights for passing fashions under the branded slogan of "Hope and Change," I fear that our children will simply discover that harsh lession that slavery is slavery and freedom casually cast aside is all but impossible to re-attain.