Human Rights

Here’s a cute way of expressing a message that the not-too-bright segment of the libertarians is fond of.

Call me weird, but I believe in human rights, i.e., things to which everyone is entitled.

Now, of course, exactly what those actually are can be debated.  Most of us would agree that freedom from slavery and torture should be on this list, but what about healthcare?  This isn’t controversial elsewhere in the world, but in the United States, we have an entire political party completely devoted to ensuring that poor people suffer and die of treatable diseases.

True, Americans don’t have universal healthcare, but we do have a considerable laundry list of entitlements (see below).  The libertarians would dearly like to make most of this disappear, but that’s not going to happen; we’re not going to privatize our sewers systems, as an example.

Clean water is yet another “right” that is coming under scrutiny, especially as climate change-driven droughts ravage our lakes and rivers.   There are 1.5 billion people on this planet who don’t have access to a glass of clean drinking water.  Now, very few of them are Americans, but that’s very likely to change as the years pass, the population increases, and greed and indifference to the well-being of others continues to expand.

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All Americans receive a bounty of valuable services that are paid for by their tax dollars:

Infrastructure, police, fire fighting, criminal justice, national defense, public education, labor laws, auto and food safety standards, air traffic control, TSA, libraries, emergency medical care, environmental regulation, social security, Medicare, the National Archives, national parks, bank regulations and deposit insurance, copyright and patent laws, federal dams to provide electrical power, flood control, the Weather Service, the Federal Housing Authority, consulates and embassies, FEMA, veterans affairs, public water systems, monitoring of all international cargo, NASA, border protection, and the National Institutes of Health.