In fact, the very same Socialist Party sees all sorts of rights.
1) Jobs.
The La Riva/Puryear campaign believes that everyone is entitled to a job. A job should be a constitutional right. Youth training and hiring programs, along with apprenticeship programs and job placement for adults of all ages can fill the employment for the projects above and more
2) Education
While Democratic and Republican candidates pay lip service to education reform, the quality of education for working-class students will continue to deteriorate as long as we live under a system that prioritizes profits over people. The La Riva/Puryear PSL presidential campaign calls for free, high quality education for all from pre-school through college.
3) Health care
The La Riva/Puryear PSL presidential campaign believes that quality health care must be free and available to all people. Capitalist insurance companies and providers must be dismantled and replaced with publicly-owned entities that provide health care for all.
4) Housing
The real root of the housing crisis lies in the capitalist system—an economic
and social system that produces for profits alone, not to meet people’s needs.
The La Riva/Puryear PSL presidential campaign believes that housing is a basic
human need and right. The foreclosures and evictions must end now.
5) A living wage
In the $12 trillion U.S. economy, working class people should be guaranteed, as a legal right, an income that assures that they will not spend the last years of their life in poverty.
6)Citizenship regardless of where you were born or how you got here.
All undocumented immigrants and residents in the United States should have full rights and equality now. That means equal wages, benefits, union rights, voting rights, and access to free, quality education, housing and health care. The government’s war on immigrants must end. Racist home and job raids must be stopped and concentration camp-style detention centers must be dismantled. The
border wall must be dismantled.
Now, think about it this way. If you believe that health care is a right, then why should it stop there? Isn't education, a living wage, housing, and citizenship just as important as health care?
The term "slippery slope"
In debate or rhetoric, the slippery slope is one of the classical informal fallacies. It suggests that an action will initiate a chain of events culminating in an undesirable event later without establishing or quantifying the relevant contingencies. The argument is sometimes referred to as the thin end of the wedge or the camel's nose. In broader, especially recent, pragmatic usage, the term slippery slope argument alternately refers to a non-fallacious argument that such undesirable events are rendered more probable. The fallacious sense of "slippery slope" is often used synonymous with continuum fallacy, in that it assumes there is no gray area and there must be a definite transition at a certain point from category A to category B.
While the general form of the argument involving a slippery slope is not valid, the conclusion it leads to is not necessarily wrong.
is in my opinion overused. Yet, here it is quite appropriate. Once health care is determined to be a basic right, then are all sorts of human needs that also fall under the umbrella of human rights. The Socialists make no bones about their view of the world. People have the "right" to free health care, education, housing, a living wage, and citizenship regardless of status. Socialists believe in a compassionate world, and they see the government as the instrument to provide that compassion. That's why to them health care is a RIGHT. It is not compassionate to let someone go without health care, and so the government must ensure that everyone is taken care of. Barack Obama sees the world the same way and so he also believes that health care is a right.
Of course, the unabashed Socialists take that world view to its logical conclusion. They don't stop at health care. They see all sorts of human needs and believe they are all rights. Barack Obama says that in a wealthy country like ours health care should be a right. Well, replace health care and one could make the same argument about all sorts of basic human needs. Yet, unlike the unabashed Socialists, he seems to stop, for now, at health care. Of course, this makes no sense. If health care is a right, and in a wealthy country like ours, everyone should get health care, why end there? Our wealthy nation should be able to provide living wages, good retirement, housing, jobs, education, and citizenship to all. After all, in a wealthy nation like ours all those basic needs should be available to all, if you believe that health care is a right, then all the things I mentioned are also rights. Of course, since they are "rights", it is the government's responsibility to provide them.
That's what makes his assertion that health care is a right so dangerous. It isn't a small leap from health care to everything. Just look at the platform of the Socialists and you can see our not too distant future if we truly do make health care a right.
A right required responsibility and common sense. The Second Amendment gives a citizen the right to bear arms, but it is also mean responsibility and common sense to bear arms for defensive purposes and not to engage in criminal or illegal activities with weapons. Many gun-owners are law-abiding citizens given this right with responsibility.
ReplyDeleteThe right to heath care is a human issue and goes beyond politics. No one in the world is completely invulnerable from diseases, accidents or life-threatening symptoms. Insurance companies are engaged in improper practices of denying or rejecting peoples the necessary treatments or therapies on the basis of their limited incomes. Rich people can afford expensive health care treatments easily and the poor people should not have receive the same kind of treatments as the rich people? That's real inequality.
I believe everyone, including YOU, have the right to affordable health care without consideration or snap decisions from insurers/HMOs for any treatment or therapy. However, we may not abuse that right as it is our responsibility to ensure that we do take care of ourselves, health-wise and not abuse the entire health care system and the medical professionals for very selfish needs. The approach is similar to how the law-abiding gun-owners keep this 2nd Amendment right with a sense of responsibility and common sense - if you wanted to bear arms for yourself for self-defense or hunting, don't abuse that right by doing something illegally or criminally.
It is my hope that all peoples, given the right to affordable health care, must not abuse the responsibility they are endowed with by the government, with respect to the health care system.
Socialists always think of "unlimited" opportunities for all. Common sense tells me otherwise.
If everyone has the right to affordable health care, why stop there? Doesn't everyone also have the right to affordable housing, a living wage, affordable education, and retirement savings for everyone?
ReplyDeleteYours is exactly the thought process that leads to Socialism. If someone can't get affordable health care, I assume that the government would provide it.
Last I checked health insurance is a for profit business. You seem to be under the impression that health insurance providers should do it out of charity. If that's the case, maybe we should include other so called rights like housing as things that also can't be for profit.
As my husband just put it: we have the right to buy/own hand guns just as we have the RIGHT to purchase insurance. Now if the government were paying for us to have handguns, the two might be comparable.
ReplyDeletePS. I just love your blog. Any chance you would let me interview you for a website I write for? I'm no high end journalist but I do have a few folks who read my stuff and I would love to get more eyes on your blog.
Thanks for the kind comments, Shanika. Get a hold of me on my email and we can arrange for an interview.
ReplyDeleteI find that there are very few things that the slippery slope is applicable to. Consider the fact that in order to apply the argument, the intermediates in the logical series (e.g. B and C in A->B->C->D) must be so close as to almost be one after another with little change. I agree that socialized healthcare is a terrible idea, but I don't think that it will inevitably lead to a landslide of socialist programs.
ReplyDeleteBecause of the very nature of healthcare, it is bound to have the "compassionate socialists" on one side yelling that money is no issue, and the capitalists on the other side, basically agreeing with the fiscally responsible view. Also, since healthcare deals directly with lives, it is one of the closest non-rights to being a right (with the whole right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness...). I really don't see a guaranteed job or guaranteed housing as being even close to a right, whereas healthcare is pretty close to life.
Regarding healthcare, people need to realize that the wholesystem is in need of review. There's a reason a surgery costs so much. Medical equipment is insanely expensive. Even the small disposable items are costly. Also, medical malpractice insurance is at all time highs. Some surgeons end up paying 300,000 annually in malpractice insurance costs, just because the job of cutting into someone's heart is one of the most risky things out there. Because of the (relatively) recent rise in malpractice suits, premiums are skyrocketing, and it seems people aren't realizing how much of an effect this has on the whole system.
Well, it's hard to live without a home, so that argument can be applied to housing rather easily.
ReplyDeleteBesides the issue isn't the availability of health care, there is plenty of health care available. The problem is that it is expensive. It's so expensive that people can't afford it so we make it free. The same thing can be said of housing.
Of course, if everyone can have a "living wage", then everyone will have enough money to have all the basic human needs. This can go round and round.
I agree that slippery slope is overused and making leaps works almost always much better in theory than in reality. Just remember that it is much easier to make government larger than smaller.
Once government takes care of your health care needs then it is that much easier for government to take care of your housing needs.