Getting it wrong about rights

First, a refresher.

The bold claims about imaginary/non-existent 'rights' continue to amaze me. Today, many people in the United States claim rights to education, medicine, surgery, doctor's visits, therapy, cell phones, housing, income, reparations, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Where does it need? And where did it begin? I'm quite unclear on the answers to both questions.

Claims of human or civil rights are the first things I can recall as being asserted, and as being embedded in the U.S. Constitution. Yet these are negative, 'natural' rights, no necessarily linked to the Constitution and not at all like the positive rights claims of today. Here is what I wrote in my earlier post, linked above:

To my mind, the primary source of division in the United States today is the (growing) disagreement over the government's role in maintaining or creating 'rights.' The government can provide negative rights (guarantees of what the government won't take from you, like freedom of speech, freedom of religion) and positive rights (guarantees as to what the government will give or provide you, e.g., public education, housing, healthcare, cell phones, food stamps, a job).

The list of positive rights grows consistently, both in the number of asserted rights to benefits and in the number of people making claim to such rights. For instance, for the United Nations, the pope or any leader of a global NGO to claim flatly that everybody IN THE WORLD has a right to "healthcare," is not only disingenuous and practically impossible, it is first and foremost to define operationally. That is, does a "right to healthcare" mean that everyone in the world have a right to hospital treatment -- meaning it is free to those with little income -- or to free pharmaceuticals, vaccines, doctor visits, medical equipment, surgery? Does the United States taxpayer have the responsibility for providing this right to everyone in the world, or just to those who cross over to and live within American borders, or just to American citizens, or to indigent or elderly Americans?

Politicians and 'activists' accept no responsibility for articulating these details, including the scope, the cost, or the source of funding for these rights. As I would tell my students, you can complain and have an opinion, but without evidence, a constructive argument, and a solution, your rhetoric -- another useless college course -- is harmful, not helpful, inflammatory, not conciliatory, political, not practical.