Freedoms

The notion of health care as a right has led me to think about rights and freedoms.

Franklin Roosevelt once gave a speech where he enumerated what he said were four basic freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

These last two were additions to the freedoms, or rights, enumerated in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, commonly called the Bill of Rights.

Rights are actions you are free to take, not things you are free to take; thus, free health care, which necessitates taking products and services from others without payment, is patently not a right.

It has been said that fear is a great motivator. Fear of losing one’s job can serve as motivation to go to work; without the fear of losing one’s job, there would be much less motivation to go to work. Freedom from fear, then, is not necessarily something to be desired. The freedom to fear is something to be cherished.

Similarly, the freedom to want is something to be cherished. Imagine a world where it was illegal to want—that is, to want more than what is possessed by the person next to you; imagine a world where there was enforced equality of outcomes so that no one had more of anything than anyone else.

This is not the kind of world I want for myself. I want a world where I can want. I want freedom to want rather than freedom from want.

Franklin Roosevelt was intellectually lazy; liberals who want to force freedom from fear and want onto an unwilling populace are just plain dangerous.