A Plethora of Rights

San Diego City Council is considering a resolution to declare that “housing is a human right” to go along with what seems to be an established policy that “health care is a human right.”

The policy would be accompanied by laws requiring landlords to pay the tenant three months rent if they decide to sell the property, or if they decide to renovate it, but the details don’t matter. At issue, for me, is the basic one of one person’s property or service being the basis for another person’s “right.”

If I own a home, which I built or am paying for with my money, what valid principle gives you a right to live in it? On the other side of that coin, why do you have a right to live in a home that you neither built or paid for? In order for this idea to hold, one has to discard the whole concept of the right to hold property.

Similarly, health care is a service provided by people who are providing that service in order to earn money to house and feed their families. What gives anyone a right to receive the fruit of those people’s labor? Is a doctor a de facto slave to anyone who has become sick?

If a physician decides that he/she no longer wishes to perform that service, but wants to work as an auto mechanic in the future, can that person be prosecuted by the federal government for denying his/her patients their civil rights, that is their right to receive health care?

It’s a reasonable conclusion, is it not. The premise is that those patients have a human right to health care, and the doctor is denying them their right.

In one news piece the reporter was referring to a “person’s right not to be offended.” This country is becoming a morass of “rights,” mostly imaginary, which are designed to make life comfortable. In doing so they make the nation weak.