What do you consider fundamental rights?

Dirty Lib John got me riled up at lunch the other day when he said he believed that health care is a fundamental right. He said that the life portion of our forefathers belief that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was a thumbs up to universal health care.

I had to pause for a minute to think about what they were talking about. The constitution, the bill of rights, and the declaration of independence are always interpreted differently and usually skewed to the debaters point of view.

So I ask all of you, what do you believe are fundamental rights?

I believe the following:

All men/women have the fundamental right to life. Meaning, we have the right to live and no one else has a right to take another persons life.

Liberty: We all have the right to live free. Meaning that we have the right to live free of bondage, free to do as we please, and free to worship how we want, sleep with who we want, and free to be worthless or purposeful.

Pursuit of happiness: We all have the right to pursue happiness, we are not guaranteed to achieve it.

Ah, I am sure some of you are looking at what I have written and thinking, "I got you, you slipped up now".

Taken how I wrote it you could argue that I am an anarchist. Well I am not, because those above rights are yours but never at the expense of someone else's rights.

You have the right to life, but not at the expense of another persons right to life.

You have the right to liberty but not at the expense of someone else's liberty.

You have the right to pursue happiness but not by taking someone else's happiness.

Confused yet? Me too.

I want to key in on the word YOU. You have the right to do all the above things, but YOU have to do them. You have no right to expect those things to come from someone else. Hell, when you receive those things from someone else you are essentially giving up your liberty. For only a free man/women can provide him/herself with those items.

When you work and then pay for a service with the funds made from said work you are providing for yourself and beholden to no one. If you are given something, with no service performed, then you are beholden to the person giving it to you.

If you can't see where I am going with this, read again and again until you do.

If you still don't get it, I present an example.

Bears in the wild can take care of themselves, but when bears find large camp grounds they move in for the free food. They never wander far and return when ever hungry. They stop working (hunting) for their food and become fat and lazy. Then the rangers come in and lock things down so the bears no longer have easy access to the campers food. WHAT HAPPENS???? The bears die, because they no longer want to hunt and they no longer remember how. Don't take my word for this, but I remember recently hearing that fewer bears are hibernating now because they have access to human food year round.

Socialism doesn't work folks. Things may not be perfect now, but I believe we need to work on fixing the problems within our CAPITALIST system, not change the whole game to what is proven a failure. You want to see failure in socialism in the USA look at California and for failure in universal health care look at Massachusetts.

I really want to hear what you have to say. I can not guarantee the convo will not get heated, but debate is always a good thing and if we keep it respectful it is even productive.