PART 2
Part 1 was posted here on Locals on 10/18/2023 -- take a look at that article before reading on!
Our success has in many ways led to our own destruction. Due to the impressive results of the American system, we now live in an incredible time of comfort brought about by technological advancement. For the first time ever, the vast majority of people are living in excess. Due to this excess, we’ve seen a massive increase in government entitlements over the last century. federalsafetynet.com gives this definition of government entitlements:
“Entitlement Programs of the federal government include Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment, and welfare programs. Entitlement programs are rights granted to citizens and certain non-citizens by federal law. The programs are either contributory or non-contributory. Non-contributory means the program benefits are available to participants without regard to whether they have contributed to the program.”
In this, we find some familiar language. It reads, “Entitlement programs are rights granted to citizens by federal law.” For the sake of argument, let’s call these “government programs” and “political rights.”
There are, in fact, things we call rights that are provided to you by the government, such as your right to an attorney when you get arrested. We wouldn’t necessarily consider that to be a natural right, since you could always just defend yourself as many people in past legal disputes have done before; however, according to our system of law and order, it is a right you have as a citizen.
Political rights are rights that are granted to you by the current system of law in a society. They can’t be called political rights until there is a respective existing law. Standing in contrast are natural rights that exist in all time and all places, regardless of what laws are on the books in a particular country.
One could make the argument that those advocating for universal healthcare as a right are stating that it is a “political right,” but this would be a dishonest take. We can freely, without moral judgment, debate whether or not something ought to be a political right. That doesn’t need to invoke such harsh name calling (such as bigot, racist, sexist, and the like) when one opposes it. There is righteous anger, however, when a person or group opposes the natural rights of individuals. The people who advocate for healthcare as a right are arguing that it is a natural right, which is proven by two aspects of the argument: 1) they are not currently political rights, so you can’t discuss them as such and 2) they believe it is a moral failure to deprive someone of such “rights.”
An easy way to determine whether something is a natural right is through what I call the desert island experiment. Imagine ten of us are stranded on a desert island after a plane crash. Ideally, we’d start to work together to come up with some shelter, a way of finding food, and methods to provide for our other basic needs. After a few days, we may begin to discuss some ground rules. The reward for adhering to these ground rules is that you get to remain a member of the group and benefit from our combined efforts and progress. I believe that these ground rules would begin with natural rights to life, liberty, property, and self-defense. As we become more civilized and increase in size, we’d probably add freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the like.
Most natural rights are passive, meaning that it doesn’t require anything of me to uphold your rights, and vice versa. Your right to property, free speech, and liberty simply outline things that I cannot do to you, not things that I must do for you. Forcing me to do things for another’s right would violate my right to freedom (just like the slavery example showed us earlier). On the desert island, it would make sense that we would abide by the wisdom found in St. Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians chapter 3,
“Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you, we did not eat any one’s bread without paying, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not burden any of you. It was not because we have not that right, but to give you in our conduct an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: If any one will not work, let him not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work in quietness and to earn their own living. Brethren, do not be weary in well-doing.”
This was the starting place of our founding fathers. As they were building a country based on a radical new system of individual rights, citizenship, and government powers that are derived from the consent of the governed, they approached rights in this very critical and rational way. Over time, however, this philosophy began to shift and we began to violate some of these basic principles in a roundabout way – through taxation.
We can recognize that, if there are only 10 of us and we are all able-bodied, we ought to all contribute to the survival of the group. If I were to simply quit working and still expect to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, you’d be just in denying me the fruits of your labor and the labor of others. However, as society grows, you start to implement a system of taxes, for good reason, to continue this concept of contributing to the pool of resources to fund that which we all benefit from, such as national defense and our governing political body.
In the US, over time, that taxation increased. In an effort to create a more loyal voter base and to try and “productively” use these excessive funds, the government began to expand the programs and entitlements to include welfare, medicare, and social security.
As Christians, we may say that this was for the better. But was it really? I believe that I have a personal duty to give of my income to help support the poor, the sick, the suffering, and the elderly who are unable to provide for themselves. I believe equally that it would be morally wrong for me to steal from the rich to give to the poor. I could not walk into your house with a gun and take from your savings to go pay the medical bills for a poor family at the hospital down the street.
But that is exactly what government programs do. They take money from some people by force to allocate it to the needs, or wants, of others. Many big-government minded believers seem to have forgotten this inconvenient truth. Whenever we discuss government entitlements, we are talking about taking money by force. Otherwise, it would be done privately through donations. When the government takes my money through social security taxes each paycheck, they aren’t setting that aside for me so that I may live comfortably in my retirement years. Even if they were, I never gave them permission to do that or opted into such a system. My social security taxes are paying for someone who is already of retirement age. According to ssa.gov, the social security admin’s own website: “Benefits are now expected to be payable in full on a timely basis until 2037, when the trust fund reserves are projected to become exhausted.” At which point, we will either raise taxes on my kids and grandkids or I won’t benefit from the social security system nearly to the extent I paid into it.
I could say that this is just a sacrifice for the greater good of society. After all, I am called by Christ Himself to be charitable and generous to my neighbor. But let’s say I have a change of heart and just want to take a year off from this generous giving toward social security. What happens then? I would be arrested, fined, and sent to prison for tax evasion. That is what we can call government force. If I give by force, is that really giving? Is it really an act of virtue to offer up my money for the good of another at the threat of imprisonment and violence?
We can only morally claim that those things to which we all ought to be forced to contribute should be provided by the government. These should generally be that which we all benefit from equally, such as national defense, police and fire departments, and the governing body of politics.
Now, we return to the original question. Is healthcare a human right? We can easily determine that it is not. The idea itself can only be founded on flawed principles and immorality.
Let’s take a look back to our desert island.. Say that on the second day, it becomes known that one of the ten of us has cancer. Does that person have a right to chemotherapy with no equipment present? Do they have the right to continual care by people who cannot provide it? Even if one of the remaining 9 was a cancer doctor, would we be just in forcing him at the threat of violence to treat this cancer patient against his will? Now, we could have a separate debate on whether or not this doctor would have a moral obligation to work to the best of his ability to save the patient’s life, but given the other existing demands when on a desert island, there could be great disagreement on what that would look like.
The simple point is that nobody has a right to something that doesn’t exist. If there were no more doctors, there could be no right to healthcare. Further, no person has a right to someone else’s effort. Nobody has a right to the use of resources they did not contribute to creating, purchasing, or maintaining. I may feel a personal obligation to be the Good Samaritan and cover the cost for my neighbor. I may even feel that you, too, share this obligation. But it is morally wrong for me to force you to partake in this act of giving.
Paragraph 2211 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the protection of the right to medical care, among other things, as a duty of a just political community. I interpret this, again, as a passive observance of our rights rather than an active one. For example, in the line before, the CCC says that the government ought to ensure “the right to private property, to free enterprise, to obtain work and housing.” These rights are a list of what you can’t prevent me from doing, rather than a list of things you must provide for me. I have the right to private property, but you don’t owe me any material things. I have the right to free enterprise, but I’m not entitled to be handed capital to start my own business. I have the right to obtain work and housing, meaning you can’t prevent me from going to work or obtaining a place to live for my family (both things that the US government routinely does through excessive and unjust regulations).
Similarly, US citizens have the right to bear arms, but we don’t give each person a gun provided by taxpayer dollars.
Some may push back against this, stating that the problem lies in the fact that there are other ways of denying someone access to healthcare. This is often where the word “affordable” comes around. This is a fair point. If a pharmaceutical company were to make the price of a widely needed medicine unaffordable for the bulk of the population, that would indeed be immoral. However, that would still not justify stealing from those who don’t need medicine in order to pay the ridiculously high prices. We do not believe that the ends justify the means.
Furthermore, knowing that the government will subsidize the costs of medicine is part of what keeps the prices so high in the first place. This points to a common economic fallacy, which is that raising prices leads to more revenue. This is often applied to the philosophy of taxation as well – that is that if we raise the tax rate, we will raise tax revenue. This is just not always the case.
This truth is that there is a point at which raising prices or taxes leads to a decrease in revenue. After all, if people can’t afford to buy it, you’re not going to make much money selling at a higher cost. The interference of government through taxation, regulations, and insurance mandates often lead to much higher costs for medicine here in the US than we see in other countries around the world.
The solution to most economic issues, such as inflation, is less government interference, not more.
Most of the bad economic policies in place today fall into one of two shortcomings: either they only consider the results for a small percentage of the population and/or they only consider the immediate results. When we take in the larger picture, as we have done here, you can see the moral and economic impacts of big government policies.
However, if you’ve allowed the government to become your god, you can’t help but want it to constantly increase in size and scope. If the government is god, you would have to believe and hope that it can be the solution to all the problems within humanity. However, history and logic have always shown that this is a strategy destined to fail. A government simply cannot provide for the wants and needs of all its people, all the time. More government control does not lead to more human flourishing. The state is incapable of creating heaven on earth.
Ultimately, this debate leads us back to the necessity of God in our society. As I stated earlier, the American system is not reliant upon every citizen being a Christian, but it does, like any civilized society that hopes to not devolve into chaos and depravity, require God for the order and structure necessary for its survival.
This is why the ever-increasing population of "nones" in the US should be alarming to us and why we must fight against it. The system that has provided more prosperity, security, and human flourishing than any that came before it, but can not remain as such if it is filled with atheists.
We find this type of thinking throughout most modern cultural debates. Religious conservatives are often painted as trying to force their views on the rest of the world, but this often misses the point. I, as a conservative Catholic, am not trying to push my views on the world. Rather, I am trying to express the right order as it is revealed through Natural Law and human reason. That differs immensely from most of my opponents who would rather craft the world according to their personal opinions and secular worldview. I’ve never once heard a Catholic say that it should be mandated by law that we all attend mass on Sundays, but rather that we should advocate for the protection of natural rights agreed upon by all believers. Contrarily, I have heard advocates of the Progressive ideology mandate that we all do and say things that align with their beliefs.
These disagreements come down to a matter of hierarchy. There are those of us who believe that we are subject to God’s law, which encompasses natural law. There are many in the middle of these debates who simply don’t care one way or the other. Then there are those who subconsciously subscribe to the motto of the Satanic Temple: “Thyself is Thy Master.” The Devil himself is known for those infamous words “Non serviam,” or “I will not serve.” Placing yourself (or humanity) at the top of the hierarchy leads to hell both here on earth and in the afterlife.
In Mark 10:45, Jesus tells His disciples, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to offer His life as a ransom for many.” If we strive to build a society with citizenry who are willing to serve God, country, family, and one another, we will be much better off than building a self-destructive society that provides all needs for free by force and the threat of violence.
Let us not shy away from boldly proclaiming these truths both for our sake and for the sake of future generations.
I would like to finish by turning to 1 Timothy 4:
A Good Minister of Jesus Christ
6 If you put these instructions before the brethren, you will be a good minister of Christ Jesus, nourished on the words of the faith and of the good doctrine which you have followed. 7 Have nothing to do with godless and silly myths. Train yourself in godliness; 8 for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. 9 The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance. 10 For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe. 11 Command and teach these things. 12 Let no one despise your youth, but set the believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. 13 Till I come, attend to the public reading of scripture, to preaching, to teaching. 14 Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophetic utterance when the council of elders laid their hands upon you. 15 Practice these duties, devote yourself to them, so that all may see your progress. 16 Take heed to yourself and to your teaching; hold to that, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.
