Doc Zero has it:

Advocates of the Democrats’ socialized medicine program often speak of the “right” to health care, or more specifically the right to affordable health care or health insurance. This notion of rights bestowed by government is one of the basic tenets of modern liberalism, which is the mirror image of classical liberalism. It is a foundation that should be attacked by the defenders of liberty at every opportunity, because if one concedes this principle, the remaining logic of “soft” tyranny becomes inexorable. This is an argument that conservatives must never grow weary of having, because there will never come a day when it’s unnecessary to make it.

The Left became preoccupied with “positive rights” over the last century. The edifice of socialism is built on the idea that people who lack the necessities of life are not truly “free.” What good is the freedom of speech to someone weak from hunger? What use is the right of free association, when you’re dying of a contagious disease? If you accept the proposition that freedom from want is a pre-requisite for enjoying all other forms of freedom, the modern liberal world-view becomes much easier to understand. It should also be easy to understand why those who believe themselves deprived of those basic necessities would find this an appealing argument.

These “positive rights” are not a precursor to the rights described in the American Constitution. The whole concept is implacably hostile to the Constitution. The “right” to food, health care, a job, or the other staples of the socialist menu can only exist in the absence of individual rights.

And suddenly I’m reminded of Heinlein’s argument on rights as presented in Starship Troopers, as toxic a tome to progressivist “thinking” as I can imagine:

Ah yes, the “unalienable rights.” Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What “right” to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not harken to his cries…If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is “unalienable”? And is it “right”? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

The third “right”? — the “pursuit of happiness”? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can “pursue happiness” as long as my brain lives — but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.

No wonder liberals tend to despise Heinlein with such a venomous passion, eh? You can agree or disagree with Heinlein’s conception of individual rights, of course, but it does tend to make any debate over the ever-expanding, government-bestowed “rights” cooked up by liberals with each successive step along the statist road seem like a wholly futile endeavor. But here’s the bit that really must frost the nuts right off our present-day illiberal liberals:

I told you that “juvenile delinquent” is a contradiction in terms. “Delinquent” means “failing in duty.” But duty is an adult virtue — indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be, a “juvenile delinquent.” But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents — people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.

And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of “rights”…and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can long endure.

As I suggested before, you don’t have to agree with everything Heinlein proposes here to recognize that the foundations of a debate truly worth having aren’t exactly what the Left claims they are. Back to Doc Zero and his main point:

This may all seem very basic, and of limited relevance in an era when the United States government has already become the largest consumer, borrower, and employer in the world. I believe in the importance of making these basic arguments, because too much of the public has come to accept situations that should be unacceptable.

And if you think that’s unrelated to what I was just saying (and excerpting) above, you need to think again.