Regarding Daniel Johnson’s Oct. 5 column:

The “right to healthcare” heralded in Daniel Johnson’s column is not really a right at all. Our Constitutional rights to life, liberty and property are negative rights, namely rights not to be physically harmed, constrained, or stolen from. On the contrary, positive “rights” such as healthcare and education are a claim on someone else’s life and livelihood, a right to be provided healthcare and education at the cost of legal servitude.

Certainly, there is some degree of medical need in America. Voluntary charity is an appropriate response for concerned Christians. However, need does not justify intervention by government coercion, which is ultimately violence. Benevolence with one’s own money is moral; forcing others to be benevolent is not.

Furthermore, Johnson’s repeated comments on the profit motive in the American medical were ignorant at best and insulting at worst. Incentives matter; what capitalism we have left in the American medical system drives quality and innovation, saving many lives. Additionally, doctors are not the slaves of altruism. They have a right to engage in the free trade of services for compensation, whenever and however they so choose.

To summarize, 2 Corinthians 9:7 says “[e]ach man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”

Allison McCarty
Freshman political science major from Flower Mound
atm07b@acu.edu