Filed Under: Headline • The Calling
Tags: Education • health care • negative rights • positive rights • rights
Positive Rights as Means Not Ends
Who's against everyone having health care?
Even though the House passed so-called “health care reform,” the debate over “entitlements” will not be going away. This is especially true if, as I believe, the bill makes things worse not better. In debates over entitlements many on the left frequently invoke the idea that whichever one happens to be at issue — health care, education, pensions — is a “right,” and therefore we should not worry about costs. After all, they say, did the authors of the Bill of Rights worry about “costs” when they passed the First Amendment?
As seductive as that analogy might be, it’s utterly misguided because it ignores the important distinction between negative and positive rights. Negative rights, such as the right to free speech, limit the State’s power to interfere with choices citizens might make. The First Amendment begins, “Congress shall make no law….” Negative rights do not require other people or entities to provide human or material resources to make that right a reality. Others are simply required to refrain from doing things that interfere; hence, the term “negative right.”
Positive rights, by contrast, require others to provide such resources. For a “right” to health care or education to have real meaning, it must entail the ability to coerce others into providing health care or educational services as needed. As philosophers say, rights are trumps. A right to free speech overrides the utilitarian calculations of particular circumstances. If you have a right to your property, it doesn’t matter how good the thief’s reason for stealing it is.
But how would does the trump work with a right to health care? Sure, we can give people money to spend on it, but how can we assure that medical services, and quality services at that, are actually delivered? Same with education. Can a positive right ever be a trump without enslaving those who produce the goods or services we allegedly have a right to — that is, without violating their negative rights?
I suspect that when leftists say people have a right to health care and education, they mean something different and that they are confusing means and ends. They seem to think that declaring something a right is an end in itself — simply doing so assures that the object of that right is secured. As I recently noted, this is the equivalent of the magical thinking of South Park’s “Underpants Gnomes,” whose business plan was: “Phase 1: collect underpants; Phase 2: ?????; Phase 3: Profit.”
Here’s the upshot: Declaring things like health care and education rights is an empty gesture unless one specifies what sorts of institutions would actually deliver those things and how those institutions would muster the knowledge and incentives to get the job done. Phase 2 has to have content to explain how the promised results of Phase 3 will be delivered! Merely declaring something a (positive) right does nothing to ensure that people will actually get what they allegedly have a right to.
The issue looks different if we think instead about positive rights as means rather than ends. If those who defend such rights were actually saying, “I think we should declare health care a right so that the largest number of people possible get the best health care possible,” at least they would be raising the right question. In response, libertarians might say, “Is declaring health care a ‘right’ really the best way to accomplish that goal?”
Here, as is often the case, libertarians might generally agree with leftists on the end: a society in which the largest number of people possible have the best health care possible. The question is how to make that happen. In responding to the claim that we need to declare health care a right, we must insist on knowing what particular institutional arrangement will be put in place to make that right real and then we must critically assess whether those institutions would do the job.
At the same time, we must continue to offer our own arguments about how alternative institutional arrangements would better deliver the desired outcome. It’s not that we don’t care about making sure people have the best health care possible. We do, but we think there are better means to that end than issuing declarations of rights. Such declarations not only fail to ensure the desired outcome, they often make matters worse by destroying the incentives and market communication necessary to deliver the goods.
Comment by Norman DeLaHunt on 25 March 2010:
Excellent points, Steven. You opened up for me a new train of thought.
If healthcare is declared to be a right, what is it a right to. If it is right to have healthcare, someone has to pay for it. How can it be called a ‘right’ if you are forced to buy it, or others are forced to buy it for you? Is that a right to be desired? Why would we want a right that we are forced to have?
Comment by Dr Steve on 25 March 2010:
Yes Norman, you have a right to a colonoscopy, and big brother will see to it you have one! Assume the position!!!
Comment by Steve Hogan on 25 March 2010:
I often use the concept of positive and negative rights in my arguments, almost always with liberals that have a burning desire to remake the world in their image. It should be persuasive, but liberals by and large FEEL rather than THINK, so it never dawns on them that the subjects of their feel-good dictates are basically slaves.
I’ve also observed how they bristle when the shoe is on the other foot. They want to be the “who” in “who is doing what to whom.” I, for one, am tired of being the “whom” in that relationship.
By the way, there seems to be a typo in the article. The following sentence doesn’t read correctly: “But how would does the trump work with a right to health care?”
Comment by Tom Blanton on 25 March 2010:
There is a distinction between negative rights and positive rights that is not often considered, that being that negative rights are generally thought of as existing outside of and prior to government’s existence. Where the Bill of Rights guarantees pre-existing negative rights, positive rights must be legislated into existence. People are not born with a natural right to have health care, education or shelter.
The idea that government has the power and authority to grant rights is dangerous because implies that government also has the power and authority to take away rights. Many people already accept the encroachment of government into areas that challenge their constitutionally guaranteed rights to a dangerous extent. To accept that the government can confer positive rights exacerbates the perception that government may rescind negative rights, which are supposedly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
Comment by Scott Mc on 26 March 2010:
I believe that as a society if the majority of people want to insist that healthcare/education or whatever else is a right then fine. What we need to change is that the “government” is then responsible through coercion etc. to deliver those rights.
What if people took it upon themselves to establish trusts, charities, etc. dedicated to providing assistance (many already exist) to those in need and unable on their own to provide for themselves these “rights”. What if Ted Kennedy (and many many others) had spent the last 50 years building private organizations dedicated to truly helping the needy and delivering assistance through their large personal wealth and connections?
Could you imagine what could have been built to help people with all the resources that have been wasted on 50-100 years of trying to achieve universal health care using the state and federal governments? Mindboggling!
Would we have a better system today if all health care was delivered by private enterprises only regulated by a customer’s ability to seek alternatives? I think so!
Pingback by Positive Rights as Means Not Ends | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty | Conservablogger on 26 March 2010:
[...] Positive rights, by contrast, require others to provide such resources. For a “right” to health care or education to have real meaning, it must entail the ability to coerce others into providing health care or educational services as needed. via thefreemanonline.org [...]
Comment by Steve Farrell on 27 March 2010:
Great nuts and bolts explanation!
Comment by Alfred Centauri on 29 March 2010:
So-called positive “rights” are in fact anti-rights, i.e., a negation of rights. There can be no “right” to violate individual rights.
A right is a moral claim to freedom of action that a government can either protect or infringe. Government is not the source of individual rights; the source of individual rights is man’s nature as a rational creature of volitional consciousness.
When a government grants “rights”, it infringes individual rights and as such, these granted “rights” are anti-rights.
There is a right to health care in the sense that it is right for a man to freely pursue health care through voluntary trade with health care providers under terms acceptable to both and absent coercion from a third party.
There is a right to health insurance in the sense that it is right for a man to freely contract for that insurance through voluntary trade with an insurance provider under terms acceptable to both and absent coercion from a third party.
Our government has and continues to infringe our true rights to health care and health insurance through its vast infrastructure of regulatory agencies that interfere with and coerce both those seeking and those providing health care and health insurance.
In order to secure our rights, our Constitution must be amended to guarantee a separation of economy and state: “Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom to produce and trade”.
Comment by Jeremy Bornstein on 7 April 2010:
Im not sure you really understand the health care situation, as system is a mess, we have one of the highest infant mortality rates and lowest life expectancy rates of the western world, Canada is beating us in Cancer survival rates. Consumer driven health care will not fix these things. Even the suggested vans in your video won’t because of all the factors of health problems people are not covered by that even rand corp does not know of. As for rights you probably should read some Dershowitz, For every ”claimed” right there is a counter one, and I hate to tell you that works for negative rights as well for example the right to smoke, the right to breath clean air, freedom of speech, a safe society, right to abortion, right to save a life, the list goes on and on