Gun rights vs. health care “rights”
A little over a month ago I posed a question about gun rights vs. health care rights. I liked all the comments on that post, but none of them were how I would have answered the question.
So why is there a right to bear arms in the Constitution, but not a right to health care?
The answer, very simply, lies in property rights. If one views the Bill of Rights through a lens of property rights, we see that almost every Amendment is a guarantee of a private property right. An “arm” is merely a piece of property, hence it can be privately owned. But how can health care be privately owned? How is it property?
In a free world (or free market), property is produced and exchanged voluntarily. So my owning of something does not forcefully impose anything on any one else. For example, I can own a gun, and my right to own that gun does not infringe on any other individual in any way. The same can be said about other types of private property: cars, clothing, iPods. Phrased even more simply, no one is harmed, forced, or imposed upon to provide me with private property: all private property is provided to me through voluntary actions.
Health care as a right, on the other hand, does not fit this description. If I wake up tomorrow and suddenly have a “right” to health care, it would mean that some doctor or doctors would necessarily be forced to provide that health care to me. At the point where I have a “right” to health care, voluntary action will have been supplanted by force.