Jefferson, rights, and health care
July 4th, 2008 | by Brian T. Schwartz |
In honor of Independence Day, it is appropriate for today’s post to concern the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson. After all, Patient Power is the health care blog of the Independence Institute.
Via a web search, one of the first pages I found was from RightToHealthCare.org, which attempts to use a quote by Jefferson to support their claim that health care is (surprise) a right:
“If we’re going to have a successful democratic society, we have to have a well educated and healthy citizenry”. — Thomas Jefferson [allegedly]
In this straightforward way Thomas Jefferson expressed the theme that underlies most of the arguments in this pamphlet and did so very early in our nation’s history. … We argued that the Right to Education is a legitimate model for the Right to Health Care. We have also provided some background about the historical opposition to both the Right to Education and, now, the Right to Health Care and wrote about the broad education and struggle that would be necessary to get the Right to Health Care widely acknowledged - to make it a right which we could all demand and protect.
For sake of argument, I’ll entertain the notion that Jefferson actually wrote or said the above quote. I could not find the phrase healthy citizenry in the electronic texts hosted by The University of Virginia’s Jefferson Digital Archive. Nor could I find the words healthy and educated close together. Google wasn’t much help, either.
But what if we implemented the “right” to health care in the same way government enforces the alleged “right” to education? Does this mean being healthy would be compulsory, as government-approved education is? After all, Jefferson says the citizenry must be “healthy” for a “successful democratic society.”
Government schools already have gym class, but gosh, grade school kids cannot even vote yet! What happens after their twelve-year sentence in government schools? How can “we” prevent them from becoming slothful, and hence threatening a healthy democracy? Are the “right to health care” folks suggesting mandatory exercise and physical checkups? Could it become a crime not to be as fit as the authorities declare that we should be? Shall the United States emulate Japan, which has mandatory waist line checks?
The whole idea premise behind people being educated and healthy for the sake of a healthy democracy runs counter to my understanding of what the American Revolution was all about: that people live for their own sake, and not for the sake of serving authorities in government. We do not become educated or healthy for the sake of government, but for ourselves.
And what is this talk about “demanding” our rights? To whom do they make demands? Physicians, nurses, scientists and engineers who develop medical technologies, manufacturers of ambulances, people who make parts of ambulances?
And if health care is a “right,” how shall government punish those who can provide but peacefully refuse to cooperate with those demanding it? And how is this different from forced labor, or slavery? How does this notion differ from the Marxist dictum, “to each according to their ability, from each according to their need”?
It’s time for some actual quotes from Jefferson:
Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance. –Thomas Jefferson: Legal Argument, 1770. FE 1:376
If health care is a “right,” and the purpose of government is to enforce rights, then those who can provide health care would lose the right to their own person. Doctors and other providers would face punishment if they refused to move and use their bodies (per the above quote) according to the will of someone who needs their services.
Is this how we should treat our doctors? “Hey Doc, my arm’s broken. You have the ability to fix it, and I have a right to that ability. If you don’t fix my arm, you’re violating my rights. Since government’s job is to protect rights, you’re a criminal for not complying with my demand. So get to it, boy!”
Or is this how we treat our friends, associates, and neighbors? Do we demand that they pay for our medical care, or donate to a medical charity, and threaten to throw them in prison if they do not? Yet this is the essence of compulsory government charities such as Medicaid and Medicare.
Not only is this entitlement mentality morally offensive and repugnant (to me, at least), it conflicts with Jefferson’s notion of liberty by violating the rights of those who can provide health care:
“Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” –Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819.
“No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” –Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, 1816. ME 15:24
To conclude:
What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:455, Papers 15:393
This means that if one person does not have the right to force another to provide health care (or any good or service) against his will, then no group of people has he right to do so, and hence government has no right to do so. Doing so would be an act of aggression.
You might also like:
