A reader writes:
Rand Paul does not deserve the nomination. You have confused positive rights and negative rights. What Americans have is the right to health, and that is a negative right. Nobody can take our health away from us, and if they do we can pursue legal action for damages incurred. A right to health care would be a positive right. It would entail giving something to someone – in this case, medical care, as opposed to taking something away from someone. Someone has to provide that health care! A right to health care can logically lead to slavery.
I support the ACA and Obama on the health care issue. I don't like Rand Paul and I despise the Tea Party, but Paul is 100% right on this issue. We have a right to health, not to health care.
Do we also have a "right" to be terribly sick? I take the philosophical point. But it's perfectly possible to make a case for universal healthcare insurance that is not based on positive rights, but on mere prudence and even justice, as many Republicans have argued over the years, and that Hayek himself supported it:
There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.
There is no greater example of a "common hazard" than poor health. Here's Newt Gingrich:
"Personal responsibility extends to the purchase of health insurance. Citizens should not be able to cheat their neighbors by not buying insurance, particularly when they can afford it, and expect others to pay for their care when they need it." An "individual mandate," he added, should be applied "when the larger health-care system has been fundamentally changed."
I think health is different from most other goods. You can see this in the American law that guarantees emergency healthcare for anyone. Why not leave people to die in their homes or the streets if you have an absolute standard of libertarian purity? Because at some point, morality and humanity come into play. And once you have conceded this principle, then the question becomes: which is the least inefficient and cheapest way to achieve public health? The evidence is overwhelming that America has not solved this problem. Another reader writes:
The Paul quote about health care and slavery might seem outlandish, but it's lifted more or less straight from the libertarian thought of Robert Nozick. Any taxation outside of the necessary amount for a military and judicial apparatus is "forced labor" and therefore slavery. Check out the "self-ownership" section from Nozick's entry in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
But what follows from it, in Nozick’s view, is the surprising and radical conclusion that taxation, of the redistributive sort in which modern states engage in order to fund the various programs of the bureaucratic welfare state, is morally illegitimate. It amounts to a kind of forced labor, for the state so structures the tax system that any time you labor at all, a certain amount of your labor time – the amount that produces the wealth taken away from you forcibly via taxation – is time you involuntarily work, in effect, for the state. Indeed, such taxation amounts to partial slavery, for in giving every citizen an entitlement to certain benefits (welfare, social security, or whatever), the state in effect gives them an entitlement, a right, to a part of the proceeds of your labor, which produces the taxes that fund the benefits; every citizen, that is, becomes in such a system a partial owner of you (since they have a partial property right in part of you, i.e. in your labor).
Another:
Isn't this the same basic argument he used in the Rachel Maddow interview regarding the Civil Rights Act and whether someone had the right not to serve black customers in a restaurant? The argument that he's giving "free" health care – wouldn't whatever insurance the person have under Obama's Affordable Care Act pay Dr Paul for his services?
Another:
Could someone please ask Rand Paul if he thinks lawyers are slaves, since anyone charged with a crime is entitled to a legal defense? Under the Constitution, no less.
Another:
If Rand Paul's medical practice didn't get about 50% of its revenue through Medicare, he would be a bit more credible on this subject.
The Dish 