Human rights are property rights
In the current health care debate (as in all health care debates), many of those in favor of government involvement in health care (either the current level or increased involvement, which is being called “reform”) insist that there is a positive right to health care—that having government pay for a certain (necessarily arbitrary) level of care is a basic human right. Of course, I and other libertarians and anarchists maintain that this is not logically possible. The only thing anyone has a right to with regard to health care is the negative right not to be prevented from engaging in voluntary interactions with others in order to obtain health care. And this right to not be interfered with (which also means that you have the right not to have a government confiscate your property to pay for others’ health care) stems from the property right each of us has in our own body—the natural fact of self-ownership.
In his book, For a New Liberty, Murray Rothbard explains the false distinction between human rights and property rights:
The basic flaw in the liberal separation of “human rights” and “property rights” is that people are treated as ethereal abstractions. If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real world he must also have the right to sustain his life by grappling with and transforming resources; he must be able to own the ground and the resources on which he stands and which he must use. In short, to sustain his “human right”—or his property rights in his own person—he must also have the property right in the material world, in the objects which he produces. Property rights are human rights, and are essential to the human rights which liberals attempt to maintain. The human right of a free press depends upon the human right of private property in newsprint.
In fact, there are no human rights that are separable from property rights. The human right of free speech is simply the property right to hire an assembly hall from the owners, or to own one oneself; the human right of a free press is the property right to buy materials and then print leaflets or books and to sell them to those who are willing to buy. There is no extra “right of free speech” or free press beyond the property rights we can enumerate in any given case. And furthermore, discovering and identifying the property rights involved will resolve any apparent conflicts of rights that may crop up.
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