The Left and its "rights"

In response to If Health Care Is a ‘Right,’ Obama is Violating It:

That is a bit of a conundrum, isn’t it?  ObamaCare is killing millions of insurance policies, while enlisting very few new beneficiaries to date, and it’s making health care much more expensive for a lot of people – a 1000% increase has been reported in Florida, where a 56-year-old woman asks in despair, “I just want to know why I can’t keep what I have.”  As we all remember from the Sandra Fluke affair, the new wisdom of the Left is that asking people to pay for something is equivalent to “denying them access.”  By that logic, ObamaCare’s premium hikes are “denying access” to insurance for the victims.

I suppose the more honest liberals would say they’re planning to make health care “free” with single-payer socialized medicine, once ObamaCare has destroyed the insurance industry (after lining the pockets of a few executives, of course – gotta love the way our President of the People’s plans always make some well-connected millionaires richer!)  

But the more basic element of the Left’s view of “rights” is that a “right” is proactively administered and distributed by the State.  Once the State gains control of something, the “right” has been protected… even if the actual results involve less access to the phony “right” in question.  Power is the literal goal, not just the secret agenda lurking behind plans like ObamaCare. 

Once the government controls something, you no longer have any intrinsic or inalienable right to it… and that’s the state of affairs in which your “right” is protected, according to this Orwellian logic.  The government will ration health care as it sees fit.  There is no moral appeal from these judgments.  Our collective right to something is the business of the State.  Our individual rights must be sacrificed so that business can be conducted.  If your insurance premiums increased 300 or 1000 percent, or your plan vanished altogether… well, that’s the judgment of the all-wise, all-powerful government, and you are meant to accept it.  

Liberals see no real dichotomy in this.  Our aggregate rights are protected by the rationing board and the glorious five-year plan.  No individual has an inalienable right to anything, including freedom of speech, which you’ll note the Left has an unseemly haste to curtail when it believes the speech in question is treasonous toward the mighty State and its magnificent rulers.

Those folks losing their insurance to ObamaCare are mere “anecdotes,” as the fashionable new leftist lingo has it – unlike the individuals Barack Obama uses as props when he’s pushing his agenda.  But let’s cut to the chase: they’re eggs, and a few of them must be broken to make the omelette of the Left’s fondest dreams.