Arguing about rights is two parts semantics, one part cruelty

Is health care a “right”? Well, US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) clearly doesn’t think so. Like food and shelter, he considers them “privileges.”

Do you consider food a right? Do you consider clothing a right? Do you consider shelter a right? What we have as rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have the right to freedom. Past that point, everything else is a limited resource that we have to use our opportunities given to us so that we can afford those things.

Of course, it’s kind of hard to have that “right” to life (let alone liberty or the pursuit of happiness) without health care, food, or housing. Not that Sen. Johnson (who, with a personal wealth of $36 million is the seventh-wealthiest person in Congress) will ever have to worry about “affording those things.”

I do feel, as a personal philosophy, a need to separate out rights that are intrinsic to an individual, qualities that cannot be taken away but must be respected. The right to personal conscience (speech, religion, etc.) is that sort of thing.

I, myself, do not consider health care and food and shelter a “right” in that same fashion. But I do consider them societal obligations, part of the social contract. If society means anything other than a thinly veiled war of all against all (as Hobbes would put it), then it means banding together to be sure that nobody starves, nobody dies of preventable illness, nobody freezes to death in the street during the winter.

Not that Sen. Johnson, again, will ever have to worry about those things for himself or his immediate loved ones. That he doesn’t worry about them for anyone else, though, speaks volumes.

Republican senator calls health care, food, and shelter a ‘privilege’
Senator Ron Johnson was asked by a high school student whether he considered health care a right.

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