So... just about any time I hear/read Rand Paul on any subject, I do an internal sigh and ask God "Really? You had to have this much variety in the the spectrum of mental health?"
"With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies," the senator said. "It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me."
"It means you believe in slavery," Paul added. "It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses."
"Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery."
"I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care," Paul continued. "You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be."
Commentary after the fold.
Now, maybe I'm like you, I'm looking around Daily Kos searching for those diaries which advocate chaining doctors and nurses to the oars with a drum at the rear of the Good Ship Hospital to the cries of "heave ho!"
What gets me is the following rhetorical questions.
do you have a right to plumbing?
Well jeez, is he talking about indoor plumbing or you know, the plumbing we're born with?
Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food?
Well jeez, both the United Nations Declaration of Human rights and the US Declaration of Independence asserts a right to Life, of which water and food are prerequisites, including I suppose air and adequate space.
You know, aside from Rand Paul's obvious straw man and hasty generalization... Rand Paul does not understand slavery.
Here is what much smarter people than I have to say of slavery;
No man can point to any law in the U.S. by which slavery was originally established. Men first make slaves and then make laws.
-Washington Bailey
Speech, Bethel Literary and Historical Association, Washington DC, Apr.
That state is a state of Slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him.
-Gill, (Arthur) Eric Rowton
Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. It broke Europe.It madethem into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy.You can't do that for hundreds of years and it not take a toll. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves.
-Morrison,Toni
Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me and ar'n't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear de lash as well and ar'n't I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern and seen 'em mos'all soldoff into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard and ar'n't I a woman?
-Truth, Sojourner
Yeah. Comparing "right to healthcare" with slavery is crass and the logic does not compute. Are doctors slaves in Britain? Or in France? Or anywhere in the world that has single payer healthcare based on the premise that we have a right to medical care as part of our right to Life?