(This piece is going to be particularly long, because I’m going to cover a variety of subjects in one article to make up for my epic failure of “BLOGSPLOSION”.)

A constantly replicating problem for me during debates I have with people regarding the American political process centers around the notion of rights and what they mean to us.  There are many individuals who ironically refer to themselves as libertarians, who somehow believe that human rights are limited only to those things spelled out in the Constitution of the United States of America.  Besides being blatantly wrong by the very words of the Constitution itself (Amendment IX), it fails to account for the fact that humanity exists beyond the borders of the United States.

To hear some of these people discuss human rights, you would think that they believe that the other nations of the world are populated by barely communicative animals, or that Americans are the only humans that matter and that if Americans do not declare their claim on a human right through the amendment process, then such a human right does not exist.

The sad fact is that Americans have allowed their sense of human rights to be subverted by an extremely narrow conceptualization– that human rights are only those things that the government explicitly sets aside for the citizenry, and that no other rights exist.  Further, that human rights are absolute and never increase with time and the advancement of new technologies.  This is a mindset frozen in time, that what was true in the 18th Century is true for all time.

I reject this notion.  I believe that the advancement of time and technology advances the human condition, or at the very least, it should.  That as we gain more knowledge as a species, that this knowledge should serve us.  The application of this knowledge should help us not just gain new knowledge and create new products and utilities, but also to unlock greater potential in our lives.

One such area that I believe this is appropriate is in the understanding of health care as a human right.  At the time of the signing of the Constitution of the United States, medicine was a completely different animal.  A little less than 10 years after the signing, the concept of vaccination would become cutting-edge medicine.  Ambulances didn’t exist.  Prior to 1880, almost 100 years after the Constitution was adopted, it was not even known that diseases were transmitted by bacteria.  The idea that the framers would even have medicine or health care on their mind was laughable, because they were still using leeches and cutting people to help even out their ‘humours’.  At the time, medicine was much less of a science than it is today– you’d be equally as likely to call a priest as call a doctor back then, because they had roughly the same success rate.

Time has passed, technology has advanced, medicine has evolved.  The rest of the industrialized world, and a good share of the developing world, now acknowledge that access to health care is a human right.  To them, it is as basic as the ability to get fair representation at trial, or to be able to choose what faith you have, to be able to speak your mind and to be able to live without fear of unreasonable search and seizure.  The reason why is that these nations have accepted a different view on the nature of the human condition– that is, that every person has intrinsic value, that if given the chance to flourish, this value will be added to the rest of society.

As well, there’s an understanding of that value as being much more three-dimensional– that value cannot be measured along a single scale of productivity or monetary gain, but rather that some people contribute to society their creativity, their wisdom, their kindness, their good humor, their friendliness or any number of diverse human qualities which make life that much better.

These nations developed this perspective through a combination of hardships:  War, Famine, Poverty, and the tyranny of Totalitarianism.  Through the regimes of Nazi Germany, Falange Espanola, Italian Fascism, the DDR, Stalinist Russia and many others, they’ve seen where a one-dimensional perspective of human value will eventually end and thus they’ve rejected that path in favor of one better suited towards the embracing of the vitality of human experience.  They suffered the ravages of war in its fullest, seeing the horror not from heroically framed newsreels, but from the windows of their own homes (if they were fortunate enough to still have one).

This differs from the American experience of these times.  Americans were sheltered far from the effects of those twisted regimes, save for the few who had relatives who lived in those nations or the soldiers who fought to defeat them.  Americans received censored and limited views of the horrors of World War.  However, this does not account for the entirety of why Americans seem so incredibly different in perspective and culture; there is a great deal to be said about the origins of “American Culture” or even the question of whether such a culture even exists (not meant as an insult, but rather a questioning of whether it would better be referred to as “Straight White Middle-class American Culture”).  It does provide one with valuable insight into why there is such a massive divergence between, say, Americans and the British, despite a shared cultural background.

In addition to the advancement of time and history having an effect on how societies view human rights, there is the question of how technology has altered this perception.  With medicine becoming a highly specialized and specified discipline comes the understanding that it is an extremely important part of life.  In order to gain the maximum value and the maximum quantity of life, one must secure adequate health care.  Since all people profit when everyone is capable of flourishing into their greatest potential, it is considered a human right of the same standing as a right to a basic education or police protection

Of course, some do not even see basic education as a right, and some others do not even see police protection as a right– these people believe it should all be privatized and we should all be forced to pay on an individual basis for these needs.  Besides neglecting the value of working within the context of economies of scale, the potential that can be unlocked through collective action, and the simplicity that can be provided when these rights are held by all rather than only those that can afford them, there’s the question about how such policies widen the gap between the rich and the poor, and how they lead to the decline of the middle class, feeding into the reversion of democratic society into oligarchy or even a full collapse into feudalism, with the wealthiest controlling all the land and everyone else being forced to work for next to nothing just to pay exorbitant rents.

People of a libertarian or conservative stripe seem to not grasp that there was a time prior to now where there WAS less regulation and these things WERE privatized, and they did not work.  Or at least they didn’t “work” for the majority of people, and thus they were changed from solely private to a system where there was a public option everyone could use, and if one so chose, private options still existed.  Regulations were imposed because the so-called “free market” failed to police itself as people today claim it would.  Of course, if you point out this fact, they will say that it didn’t work because it wasn’t FREE ENOUGH.  I don’t know if these people quite understand that we’ve tried things their way before– there’s a reason Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, and it wasn’t because the government was overly involved in the meatpacking industry.

With the advent of MRIs and other high-tech (and high-expense) medical equipment, the potential exists to prolong life and fight death.  The question is, how do we decide who gets to take advantage of this great potential; those who make the most, or those who need it the most?  Do we prioritize medical care only for those whose wallets are fat enough or whose bank accounts are hefty enough, or do we prioritize it towards those who will benefit the most from it?  Fact of the matter is, regardless of however the health care system is aligned, rich people will always be able to get what medical care they want.  We need to concern ourselves with the people who can’t get any health care, or for those who health care costs constitute a constant threat to their ability to support their families through the high rate of medical bankruptcy.

We do this by doing what we’ve done with libraries, the police, the fire department, the schools and many other parts of our daily lives which we take for granted.  Libraries in the U.S. are top-notch and provide an excellent service with taxpayer money– indeed, it is the clearest example of socialized anything in American life, as taxpayer funds are used to literally buy a private good and offer it up to the public at no cost (save for fines for abusing the privilege by damaging the books or for holding them longer than the assigned period).  The police actually do a very good job in the U.S.: indeed, if anything can be said about them, it is that they are TOO productive, as the percentage of the population currently incarcerated exceeds the levels of those in totalitarian regimes due to the Drug War.  Fire Departments do an excellent job, and they never hand you a bill when they put out a fire– indeed, paying your taxes is enough, and few people bitch about it (those that do are certifiable whackjobs).  And finally, while some argue that public schools are failing, I’ve found that for those who wish to learn, the system does a good job– besides, you can lead a kid to knowledge, but you can’t make him learn.  The people who complain about public schools the most are often the ones who apparently paid the least attention while in school themselves.

Regardless, the object of human society and civilization should be towards the improvement of its members– or rather, what is the point of even having a society or civilization, if its benefits are reserved for a limited chosen few?  Why bother advancing science and technology, if the fruits of its bounty are set aside only for those few who already enjoy a great standard of living?  Finally, why bother even continue to exist as a species, if we refuse to act like it– if we act like every other man is competition, rather than an ally?