Wednesday, December 4, 2019

QUORA: 'Could the 9th amendment about non-enumerated rights mean that healthcare is right?'



If this question refers to the “right to healthcare” as advocated by Bernie Sanders and his ilk, then the answer is, No. 

Rights are not arbitrary creations of government or politicians. Rights belong to individuals, and only individuals—no other unit of humanity exists. A right is a guarantee of freedom of action to pursue a goal without coercive interference from others. A right is not a guarantee of achieving that goal. There is no right to goods or services that others must be forced to provide. There is no right to enslave. Therefore, there is no right to healthcare other than what you can secure for yourself, or what others are willing to provide voluntarily through trade or charity. 

The concept of individual rights as unalienable, also known as natural rights and which the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution refer to, means that all individuals possess the same rights, which means one’s right to act ends where the violation of others rights begin. Rights precede government, which is created “to secure these rights.” The unalienable rights of others constitutes the boundary beyond which the rightful actions of any individual cannot go, including individuals as elected legislators or government officials acting on their constituents’ behalf. The Ninth Amendment refers only to these unalienable rights. 

For those interested in digging much deeper into the issue, I recommend Tara Smith, Moral Rights and Political Freedom, and Randy E. Barnett, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty Chapters 9 (“The Mandate of the Ninth Amendment”) & 10 (“The Presumption of Liberty: Protecting Rights Without Listing Them”).

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