Your Rights: Verbs, Not Nouns -- Actions, Not Things

Yaron Brook, at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, has written a great piece titled, "Why Are We Moving Toward Socialized Medicine?" I recommend reading the whole thing, but there are some tidbits I'd like to share:

By the time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, this view of health care as an economic product--for which each individual must assume responsibility--had given way to a view of health care as a “right,” an unearned “entitlement,” to be provided at others’ expense.

This hints at the fundamental problem with our health care discussion, and many things that are going wrong in America today. People seem to have this equation burned into their brains:

a right = a "thing" one is entitled to

The dirty little question is, where does the "thing" I'm entitled to come from? As Ron Paul said, it's easy to evade this fundamental question by answering it with "society." So not only am I entitled to some "thing", but the money and effort to create or buy that thing comes from "society" -- a very convenient way to look at things, because it keeps you from facing the the reality that somebody, an actual person, has to give up his time, effort, and/or money to put that thing in your pocket.

When it comes to things like Medicare and Social Security, that time, effort, and money are given up unwillingly and without any freedom to say no. In a word, it is theft. It's legal theft, but still immoral theft.

The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a “right” to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a “right” to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services.

You are not entitled to anything I produce, unless I freely give it to you. In an honest, balanced, and rational society, you would not have a "right" to anything that is a thing. As Yaron Brook so eloquently puts it:

Rights, as the Founders conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but to freedoms of action.

You have a right to verbs (live freely, control your own property, and pursue happiness) but not to nouns (health care, medicine, universal mail service, a paycheck). Unless of course you use your real rights (your actions) to pay for those things and receive them from other people who freely offer them in return.