The Birds and the Bees of Human Rights

Wealth and surplus can confuse a lot of people as scarcity is the basic element in all economics and trade.  

A checklist from Perry on the undiscussed birds and bees of human rights:

Every time I hear “healthcare/education/college/housing/food/whatever is a human right,” I ask:

1. What goes in the category of “human rights,” and who decides? For health care, for example: is chemotherapy a human right? Are Band-Aids? What about cosmetic surgery? Does the answer change if the chemo patient was a lifelong smoker who developed lung cancer?

2. Who pays for the provision of the goods and services that are considered “human rights”?

3. Who produces, possibly coercively and forcibly, the goods and services that are considered “human rights”?

4. Which alternative uses of our scarce resources do we give up in order to produce chemotherapy, “free” college or “free” Band-Aids, and who decides on those inevitable, numerous and complicated trade-offs?

5. Given scarce/limited resources, what do we do when these multiple “human rights” inevitably come in conflict with one another? Should we build another housing complex to provide “free” housing or another college to provide “free” education or another cancer treatment center to provide “free” health care? As before, who decides, who pays and who produces?