[mattmaroon]

Then you get into positive vs negative rights. We’re very much a negative rights society and you can’t square the two. Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does. Your positive right is someone else’s lack of a negative right, the opposite isn’t true.

For someone to have a positive right to shelter, for instance, you have to take shelter from someone (or, as we typically do, money from someone to pay for it). Taxation is the one way we’ve managed to get people to at least someone accept positive rights here, but if you ask anyone under 30 who is a Republican why they are, they’ll almost always cite positive rights like welfare. It’s so uncomfortable feeling to us that it becomes the basis of our political philosophy frequently.

It’s never felt comfortable to me to call things like that a right. Public health care is the only sane option, IMO, and we should do it, but calling it a “right“ always feels wrong to me and I think most Americans agree because we’re so strongly in the negative rights camp.

[StockHuman]

> Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does.

The lack of positive rights infringes on a society’s own fabric, however. The right to a lawyer or legal counsel is a positive right born from the ideal of fairness under the law; I’m not sure framing the American (conservative?) character as so staunchly against positive rights is correct. Police protection is very popular with the right, and that necessarily involves the labour of others.

Society ensuring some minimum standard of health so that one may properly navigate life (and enjoy the rest of their rights) is framed as a right as health is a general precursor to everything else: it’s not that odd a framing, no? “You have the right to vote, but not to live long enough to get to the polls” is the outcome of categorizing essential societal functions as somehow out of scope of what society should do. I think the average Republican gets that, though a lower tax bill is always the priority.

[hajile]

In the US, the police have NO legal obligation to help or protect you.

"Rights to healthcare" ultimately means "rights to enslave healthcare workers". If healthcare workers refuse to serve you, you have no healthcare unless you force them to serve you which makes them your slave.

Positive rights always end up in some form of forced labor aka slavery.

The lawyer question is different. The government is given the right to enforce laws, but the responsibility to provide legal council to counterweight the force of government. Lawyers aren't compelled to be public defenders, but if no public defender were available/willing, the government would not be allowed to imprison and try someone, so it is a negative right.

[StockHuman]

The comparison to slavery is rather distasteful. Both by recognizing actual slavery and by the simple reality of public service being a profession, not a sentence. Your right to health compels tax resources to be spent caring for you, not enslaving people into free cardiology.

The practice of healthcare already comes with the understanding that all who seek treatment (resources permitting) will be treated, and the interrelationship between patient, hospital, doctor, and the duty to care is foundational to the right to healthcare. It is however not the point. EMTALA in the US could be further reading if you’re interested in how refusal of care works in practice re: funding.

As per law, in the hypothetical where no lawyer could be found to take the case and no public defendant compelled to, the situation merely continues with rights violation, instead with a delayed trial or excess imprisonment. Like all rights in general, the loss of one weighs on the rest as if a ball on a net.

[robertlagrant]

> The right to a lawyer or legal counsel is a positive right born from the ideal of fairness under the law; I’m not sure framing the American (conservative?) character as so staunchly against positive rights is correct.

This is a negative right: the state cannot prosecute you without a lawyer on your side.

> Police protection is very popular with the right, and that necessarily involves the labour of others.

Police protection is not a right. The police will come and investigate and follow up, maybe, but you can't assume they'll protect you. They might be far away and unable to do so.

[mattmaroon]

You have the right to live as long as you want to, you just don’t have the right to make me pay for it. Those are two very different things, both ethically and practically. (I am, as I said, pro public health care anyway.)

You are correct that police and attorneys for the indigent are a couple positive rights. I didn’t mean we don’t have any. We just don’t have a culture of them.

[mattmaroon]

Put another way, something that didn’t even exist 100 yrs ago can’t be framed as a right. Saying I have a right to an iPhone is the same as saying I have a right to health insurance.

[StockHuman]

The right to a gadget and the right to health are incomparable on a number of levels. Even besides that, women’s suffrage is less than a century old in most places, and just about in the rest. Gay rights are even younger. Health, women and gays have all existed since the dawn of time; the “when” in codifying rights has never really correlated with historical prevalence, only societal development.