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assume that the un charter defines what fundamental human rights are and that as signatory the united states is bound by that.
i expect that alot of the ultra-nationalist anarcho-capitalist types will go a little wonky on this point since, like almost all of 20th and 21st century reality, its not written into the constitution....but i see no particular reason to take that line of argument seriously.
anyway, if you assume that people possess certain rights as a function of being human--because being human at this point means being part of a socio-economic and political system---it follows that system actions should be built in order to protect and maintain those rights. from there, a requirement that health care be made accessible to all, regardless of income, regardless of situation, follows.
if you think about it, the united states is a political system that for 60 years has devoted the bulk of its resources to organizational and technological systems designed to kill people in great number. we are, then, a culture of death. in a very christian way, we treat life as if it were cheap.
what is the basis for this?
the way a social system allocates resources is a good indicator of it's political priorities. the united states does not provide basic health care to all because politically this is not an important goal. the debate is really about changing that---changing the assumptions about how a functional social system should be organized and then moving to make the united states something more like a functional system.
conservatives seem to be under some bizarre-o impression that "individuals" exist in opposition to the social. this is simply idiotic, and at some many basic levels that it's hard to know where to begin taking it apart. perhaps because it is so idiotic that it's dificult to screw up the energy to bother with it. but think about language---is that an individual or a collective space? conservatives talk for the most part in a shared medium, they operate in a socially coherent manner day to day--none of that would be possible is "individuals" simply sprouted from the ground.
we are in a social system. one of the things a social system does is reallocate resources. welcome to the modern world, the one that took shape across the 200 years since the constitution was written, the one that makes 18th century notions of the individual quaint, an object of curiousity---and entirely useless as an analytic device.
individuals are possessed of rights because theyre defined that way through legal actions.
they don't bear them "naturally"
political theory origin myths--all that state of nature shit---are fairy tales developed to justify or criticize a political order that existed at the time they were written.
lockes second treatise on government is a speculative exercise.
you'd think conservatives would know this quite basic fact.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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