Judge Napolitano: That government is best which governs least

"...Here are the facts: After the Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska in 1989 had been cleaned up and nearly paid for by Exxon, the oil companies lobbied the Congress for liability limits — maximum amounts that they could be held to pay for in the event of a disaster.

"A Republican Congress and President Clinton together made it the law that oil companies would be limited to pay $75 million for cleanups and the taxpayers — that would be you — would pay the rest. In return, the feds would be able to tell the oil companies where to drill.

"In the case of BP, it asked the state of Louisiana if it could drill in 500 feet of water and Louisiana said it could. The federal government vetoed that and told BP could only drill in 5,000 feet of water.

"Never mind that no oil company had ever cleaned up a broken well at that depth and never mind that the feds had never monitored a broken well at that depth and never mind that BP only needed to set aside $75 million in case something went wrong. The feds trumped BP's engineers and the feds trumped the wishes of the folks who live along the Gulf Coast and the feds decided where this oil well would be drilled.

"Disaster struck. The feds did nothing. Oil gushed out in an amount that is so great as to be immeasurable. Political pressure grew.

"The president eventually panicked because he believes that his federal government can right every wrong, regulate every activity and protect us from every catastrophe. He is wrong. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was ready to build barriers to protect his state's coastline and the feds said no.

"The president even invoked powers that allow him to supervise the cleanup using BP personnel and equipment. And the oil still gushes. Last week, the president stopped all oil drilling in the Gulf putting thousands out of work. Last night he demanded billions from BP so his team could decide who gets it and today a terrified BP gave him all the cash he asked for.

"So, the government that foolishly limited BP's maximum liability, the government that claimed it knew where best to drill, the government that actually stopped locals from protecting their own shoreline — that would be that same government that bankrupted Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Post Office, Amtrak and virtually everything it has managed — now wants to decide who gets BP's cash.

"The last time this government had this much private cash to give away, during the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, it disregarded well-settled law and gave it to the labor unions. To whom will it give this cash — the innocent injured or its political friends?

"The government cannot protect us from every catastrophe, especially ones its rules have facilitated. How about this: That government is best which governs least."

Emphasis is mine. The entire article can be viewed here.

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Judge Napolitano: Is Health Care a Right?

Answer is No.

The Senate now apparently has 60 votes to pass the government health care [deform] bill, now that Senator Nelson of Nebraska is happily bought at the expense of taxpayers in other states.

The 2,000 plus-page Senate bill, which is tacked on to H.R. 3590 Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009, is even worse than the House bill for small businesses and taxpayers. It contains just about everything that people across the country have been protesting against since this summer: so-called monthly abortion premium, monthly penalty fee for not having insurance, so-called "death panel", tax on medical device, tax on prescription drugs, new tax on PBMs (Pharmacy Benefit Management, third party administrators of prescription drug programs), not to mention gigantic new power for IRS and effective national ID scheme which were already in the House bill.

The government and the supporters of the government's plan call health care "a right". And this bill will force us to participate, whether we like it or not, with the threat of penalty and jail time. One heck of a right, I say. (Or one heck of a Newspeak, I should say.)

But is health care a right? Judge Napolitano doesn't think so.

What Is a Right? (Andrew P. Napolitano, 12/18/09 Lewrockwell.com)
[emphasis is mine]

In the continually harsh public discourse over the President’s proposals for federally-managed healthcare, the Big Government progressives in both the Democratic and the Republican parties have been trying to trick us. These folks, who really want the government to care for us from cradle to grave, have been promoting the idea that health care is a right. In promoting that false premise, they have succeeded in moving the debate from WHETHER the feds should micro-manage health care to HOW the feds should micro-manage health care. This is a false premise, and we should reject it. Health care is not a right; it is a good, like food, like shelter, and like clothing.

What is a right? A right is a gift from God that extends from our humanity. Thinkers from St. Thomas Aquinas, to Thomas Jefferson, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Pope John Paul II have all argued that our rights are a natural part of our humanity. We own our bodies, thus we own the gifts that emanate from our bodies. So, our right to life, our right to develop our personalities, our right to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, our right to worship or not worship, our right to travel, to defend ourselves, to use our own property as we see fit, our right to due process – fairness – from the government, and our right to be left alone, are all rights that stem from our humanity. These are natural rights that we are born with. The government doesn’t give them to us and the government doesn’t pay for them and the government can’t take them away, unless a jury finds that we have violated someone else’s rights.

What is a good? A good is something we want or need. In a sense, it is the opposite of a right. We have our rights from birth, but we need our parents when we are children and we need ourselves as adults to purchase the goods we require for existence. So, food is a good, shelter is a good, clothing is a good, education is a good, a car is a good, legal representation is a good, working out at a gym is a good, and access to health care is a good. Does the government give us goods? Well, sometimes it takes money from some of us and gives that money to others. You can call that taxation or you can call it theft; but you cannot call it a right.

A right stems from our humanity. A good is something you buy or someone else buys for you.

Now, when you look at health care for what it is, when you look at the US Constitution, when you look at the history of human freedom, when you accept the American value of the primacy of the individual over the fleeting wishes of the government, it becomes apparent that those who claim that healthcare is a right simply want to extend a form of government welfare.

When I make this argument to my Big Government friends, they come back at me with…well, if people don’t have health insurance, they will just go to hospitals and we will end up paying for them anyway. Why should that be? We don’t let people steal food from a supermarket or an apartment from a landlord or clothing from a local shop. Why do we let them take healthcare from a hospital without paying for it? Well, my Big Government friends contend, that’s charity.

They are wrong again. It is impossible to be charitable with someone else’s money. Charity comes from your own heart, not from the government spending your money. When we pay our taxes to the government and it gives that money away, that’s not charity, that’s welfare. When the government takes more from us than it needs to secure our freedoms, so it can have money to give away, that’s not charity, that’s theft. And when the government forces hospitals to provide free health care to those who can’t or won’t care for themselves, that’s not charity, that’s slavery. That’s why we now have constitutional chaos, because the government steals and enslaves, and we outlawed that a long time ago.

Andrew P. Napolitano [send him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His next book is Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History, (Nelson, 2010).

(Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com.)

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