Health Care Is Your Unalienable Personal Duty

Since the Great Infestation of Progressivism began almost a century ago, Americans have increasingly focused on what their “rights” are.  They have paid less and less attention to what their unalienable duties are to the point that talk of them are now non-existent. So keeping that in mind, let’s bring it back into focus.

Let’s first start with the definition of unalienable, right, responsibility, and duty:

unalienable: incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred.

right: something to which one has a just claim.

responsibility: Something for which one is responsible; a duty, obligation, or burden.

duty: An act or a course of action that is required of one by position, social custom, law, or religion.

Our Founding Fathers were prescient in describing what our unalienable rights are and what responsibility the government has in performing their duties:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Declaration of Independence

Notice that these rights are unalienable, given to us by our Creator. The next sentence confirms the first – “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…”. So you can see that Government was never given the power to grant these rights to us; only the power to secure.

William Blackstone, upon which the Founding Fathers consulted, confirms:

Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as are life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolable.  On the contrary, no human legislation has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

The Constitution continues from the very beginning in affirming that Government’s sole duty is the responsibility of securing our unalienable rights:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the generalWelfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Preamble, U.S. Constitution

Madison, in Federalist No. 10, gets to the meat of why Government’s sole responsibility and duty is only to secure our unalienable rights.  It is because of the fallibility of humans:

The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects. James Madison Federalist Paper No. 10

You must be asking by now, “What does this have to do with health care being an unalienable personal duty?”. So let’s discover the answer to your question.

We begin with the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. Declaration of Independence

Here you have the keystone for what the Founding Fathers constructed the Constitution upon, the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.  They told us in no uncertain terms that all instructions to the government in the Constitution originate in the Laws of Nature, which are God’s Laws.

John Locke illustrates this truth further:

The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it… John Locke

We learn from Locke that an individual lives in the state of Nature (unalienable rights) and he/she can enjoy the state of Nature (life – including health, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) by dutifully performing the laws of Nature.

Let us look to Frederic Bastiat for confirmation:

We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.

But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. This process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.

Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. Frederic Bastiat – The Law

In other words, health care is your unalienable personal duty and not a right that government has the power to bestow upon you or any other at the expense of another.