Humanity still has not come to
a consensus on what are entailed specifically within the rubric of human
rights. Even in terms of those specifics that have come to be generally held to
be human rights, such as in designated war crimes and crimes against humanity
by international agreement, the lack of de jure and de facto enforcement render
such agreement nugatory in practice. As a result, calls for human rights are in
effect calls for warring to stop. The enforcement that goes along with laws
legislated by governments render any consensus on what constitutes human rights
more substantive in practice. This is undercut, however, in empire-scale
polities of polities, such as the E.U. and U.S., to the extent that human
rights are carved out at the federal level to applied across differing
cultures. Such ideological diversity between the American member-states has
triggered drastically-different notions of just what are included as human
rights to be played out in Congress. The debate over the government-financed
health-insurance program for the poor in 2025 illustrates such a lack of
consensus, which in turn suggests that the member-states should play more of a
role in how or even whether to provide free insurance to the poor. Sometimes,
one size doesn’t fit all. In short, the matter of federalism is very relevant
up front, before matters of the proper role of government itself and of human
rights are decided. In other words, the qualitative and quantitative
differences between a union of states and a state are very relevant up
front, lest states eventually peel off in utter frustration with a
one-size-fits-all approach to policy-making to fit an empire composed of
member-states.
The full essay is at "Is Healthcare a Human Right?"