Dr. Rangel on Rights and Entitlements
Posted by GruntDoc on 8th March 2006
Dr. Rangel is dead-on here:
With so few Americans knowing what their rights are and not even understanding what the concept of "right" means, it worries me when I see surveys like this one that found that 77% feel that health care should be a right guaranteed by the government. But health care is not a "right". Health care is an entitlement in this sense. It worries me that people use "right" and "entitlement" so interchangeably.
Health care is a service that requires others to provide and these providers must be compensated. However this compensation does not come from the government. As Dr. Peikoff (PhD) pointed out, "Government is not a productive organization; it has no source of wealth other than confiscation of the citizens’ wealth, through taxation." Government simply acts as a collector and distributor. The actual compensation comes from us or rather those of us who pay taxes. Taking something from someone and giving it to someone else does not make it a "right".
(Emphasis mine)
I’ll never think of this without the (paraphrased) PJ O’Rourke quote "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free."
Read the rest of Dr. Rangel’s post, it’s excellent.
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