Christopher Pang
The “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement has been well over a month and protestors seemed to be garnering more support than ever. These “occupants”, some of which are protesting, in hope of a “fairer system” that provides health care, education and opportunity for all. Obama and other Republican presidential candidates, in a bid for presidency elections, started on class warfare as a populist move, to get the rich to pay their “fair share of taxes to pay for a jobs bill.
Therefore my questions to this misguided group of people and President Obama are “What is a fair share?” and “Why should everyone be ENTITLED to healthcare and education?”
In order to answer the questions above, we need to identify the natural rights of individuals and how entitlements are basically promises by government to violate rights of one particular group of individuals to benefit another group of individuals. Every individual only has the basic inalienable rights to life, liberty and property.
Life: Everyone is entitled to live once they are created.
Liberty: Everyone is entitled to do anything they want to so long as it doesn’t conflict with the first right.
Property: Everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it doesn’t conflict with the first two rights.
Many people misunderstood the right to live by insisting since they have a right to life, denying healthcare to them is denying them the right to life. The state therefore must provide the necessary healthcare for them. The right to life only applies to a human being’s right not to be killed by another human being. It is a form of “negative right”, which protects us from coercion from others (including government) to do something for another group of individuals, acknowledging others have the same rights as us.
Healthcare provided by government is an entitlement. How is it fair that an individual who did not pay a single cent of taxes to the healthcare program be entitled to free healthcare while many others who are paying much higher for their healthcare than it should be? How is it fair that the rich is paying higher amount of taxes but getting less in government handouts? Is it because the rich is rich, therefore they can afford it? And because they can afford it, therefore it is fair. Similarly it is definitely unfair that a group of comfort food consumers have to pay for the bills of healthcare consumers. Healthcare, like all other goods and services, is not unlimited and follows economic laws of scarcity. Health care is a need, like water or food. And like water or food, it isn’t free. Doctors/nurses have to go through proper training, medicines need to be researched and tested, before procurement and production, hospital beds do not appear by waving a magic wand just because it is government funded.
Similarly if Warren Buffett wants to contribute more tax voluntarily, no one is stopping him because it is his own property and he should be free to do whatever he wants with it. However enacting into a tax legislation and to force high income earners to contribute the same through income tax is pure coercion. The rich is not obliged to share their wealth with the rest of the society. The rich can only acquire their wealth by serving others in a capitalism model, providing what others values who are willing to pay a premium for this good/service, resulting in profits for the capitalist. The misconception that everyone has a right to be distributed a portion of the wealth of the rich is immoral. Similarly this applies to bailouts for the banks on Wall Street for socializing losses. These banks should have failed in 2007 if not for the Federal Reserve intervening and providing emergency funding. Two wrongs do not make things right by taxing the rich. Not every rich individual acquired their wealth from Wall Street and not every individual who acquired their wealth from providing financial services on Wall Street received bailout funds.
No one should be entitled to any freebie just because he has a Social Security number in USA or has a pink I/C in Singapore. For some reason or another, people today believe they should have entitlements to healthcare, education and housing. If something must be provided to us at the expense of someone else in order for us to have it, then it may be an entitlement, a privilage, or an act of charity – but it is not a “right”. Unless we correct our misconceptions on rights and entitlements, we will continue to give up our rights to liberty, property and eventually our lives to our political leaders in exchange for these entitlements.
Based on your ‘natural rights’ reasoning, what Obama is trying to do is liberty as it does not trample on the first right .
All 3 rights are inalienable rights. The first right is just a right to life. All 3 rights should not be compromised. Obama has infringed the 3rd right to property by taxing the high income/rich to pay for a bill to create jobs for the unemployed. How is that a fair share? Jobs don’t need to be created by building a bridge which no one uses so that a construction worker can carry on being employed in the construction industry. Construction workers either need to lower their wages such that it makes sense for projects to be profitable or they retrain in another skill such that they would be employed. Jobs should not be created by government for sake of getting people employed. This would only result in unproductive use of labour, resources and tax money from more productive sources which could have been reinvested.
You have chosen to use Locke’s theory but bear in mind that in the American Declaration of Independence, property was substituted with the pursuit of happiness.
The ideal of law and government is the regulation of life in a country so as to enable security and economic progress.
When some of act as parasites off the value generating class, the imbalance must be corrected. (e.g.: food centre “managers” who lease from the government and charge ridiculously high rentals) This is relevant from both ends of the economic spectrum. Ideally, this correction should be targeted.
When some manipulate, through the money at their disposal, the entire legal and economic framework of a nation, the resulting corruption, too should be corrected. (The Regan years in the USA are an example. The most powerful statement that this was the case is a clip of a Banker telling the US president to hurry his speech up, shown in a Michael Moore film Capitalism. Of course, the political scientist can look to the laws enacted by that administration for further evidence.)
It is interesting you mentioned Mr Buffett. There are few who would question that his integrity and acumen in the business had made Berkshire Hathaway shareholders very wealthy.
He famously said he is a very lucky and blessed man. To be born in America, to be good at asset allocation which pays extraordinarily well compared other noble professions like leading the Boy Scouts. That is why he believes in giving back to society, and that other wealthy people in the country should pony up and pay their taxes instead of bitching about reducing taxes for the rich through corrupt Congress representatives.
Buffett fans step right up!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiTkU9eIFPs
This line of reasoning has roots from Rawl’s work “A Theory of Justice”, which argues that under the ‘veil of ignorance’, if you didn’t know whether you would end up rich or poor in this life, it is natural that people would freely choose a ‘fair’ social system that maximizes the possibility that you are better off no matter what life throws at you. This is a basic insurance coverage that everyone would elect to have under the veil, thus in such a system where freedom and equality is valued, what is covered under this basic insurance coverage would be deemed inalienable rights.
Wouldn’t it be good (for everyone) to know that if you are unlucky to have caught lethal airborne communicable diseases like SARS, you would be treated even if you cannot pay for it, as opposed to being quarantined and left to die? What would happen if SARS carriers are unwilling to seek treatment when the latter is true?
Having illustrated that healthcare can be a right too, I disagree with your statement that “healthcare provided by government is an entitlement”.
On a side note, could you clarify why every individual has a basic inalienable right to property?