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Comment by MR4D | Hacker News Reader

The American view of human rights is that your fundamental rights are endowed by your creator, and not given to you by man. In other words, no person is needed to provide a right to you. So, for example, free speech is yours - nobody needs to give it to you.

For healthcare, if you were to have a right to it, then someone would have to be there to provide it. Logically, at some point, a person could be forced (presumably by a government) to provide it to you. This is contradicting the principle set above (and you are therefore violating THAT person's rights).

So when Americans are criticized for not considering the internet or healthcare or other things as a "right", that is the reason.

You don't have to agree with it, but the fundamental rights upon which the country was founded come from this principle.

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> The American view of human rights is that your fundamental rights are endowed by your creator, and not given to you by man. In other words, no person is needed to provide a right to you.

I'm not arguing that you are necessarily wrong, but I am arguing that your point and the actual execution of our government are contradictory.

Notable contradictions to the above, the 2nd, 18th & 21st amendments. Let's go with the 2nd since is wonderfully controversial. Via the above definition and a loose modern interpretation of modern state of the law: People have the right to own guns. The government doesn't have the right to stop it.

But relying on the quoted above, and if we're discussing rights given via a creator, and not rights given by another man, there is no constitutional right to be able to buy a gun. A person can own a gun, and create a guy and form a militia of gun owners, but the government is well within it's rights to ban the sale of all guns in the country without any violation of the 2nd.

Now we're all reasonable people here, and know that's not the contemporary interpretation. And no-one (certainly least me) is arguing that it should be. But what it does point out that that we can't use the concept of "rights given by a creator" as a necessary criteria for supporting or judging contemporary interpretation of rights and law. Not that it hasn't happened.

So again I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that it's a contradictory argument against healthcare. If we say we cut out healthcare for that reason, then we also have to also cut out everything that has the same lacking reason.

As far as I can tell, you're making this up. You have a nice concise definition, but the idea that the "American" definition of human rights is constrained to things that no one has to provide for you is absurd. You have the right to an attorney. God doesn't make attorneys.

In this case, no one is being forced to provide health care.

There are doctors who want to provide healthcare and it is being denied in the same way a violation of free speech would be, by force.

No human rights are violated by allowing Assange to receive required care from consenting doctors, but the consequences created by people/governments with no interest in his well-being are violating his rights by limiting/denying the choices he should have available to him.

So how do we exacerbate the downfall of this way of thinking? If, generally (as you suggest), folks who believe in a 'creator' are to blame for perpetuating it, then I'm very excited by a number of recent studies that the belief in a creator is on the decline among young folks here in the US.

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