Health care/education is NOT a right

Thanks for your response, Pro. First of all, I'd like to note that Pro has not offered a defense of his initial argument that "In order for something to be a right, everyone must be able to exercise the 'right' at the exact same time." At most, Pro has challenged whether a few of the rights I identified (from the Bill of Rights) are actually "rights," since they depend on compulsion. I'll get to that in a bit. But I also identified several rights which Pro has not rejected - the right against self-incrimination, freedom of speech and religion, and the right to send children to religious school. As I demonstrated above, none of these rights can be exercised by every person at the same time. That line of reasoning by Pro this stands rebutted. But let's get into the meat of this debate, which turns on how we define a "right." The rights I identified all come from sources of positive law - the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court case law, and international law, specifically. My opponent doesn't coherently define a "right" - he says instead that "Rights...just are." They are not something that can be "given," but only "recognize[d]." "They just are" isn't even an argument; it's a bald assertion that nobody should accept on any topic. What is the source of rights? God? The state? Natural law? I would reject all of those answers, for various reasons, but we need to make the effort to define what a "right" is if we're going to argue about whether certain things - like healthcare, education, or jury trials - are rights or not. So to answer this question, let's contrast how my opponent and I are applying rights theory. For my opponent, all rights seem to boil down to a single right - the right to not be compelled or coerced to do anything one does not wish to do by anybody, limited only to the extent that one must honor the reciprocal right of others to be free from coercion. But this is not a right that has ever been broadly - or even narrowly - recognized within any society. Setting aside for the moment whether this is workable at all in practice (it isn't), it represents a deeply ahistorical understanding of what "rights" are, because woven into the very concept of rights is the concept of Rule of Law. While this space is much to restrictive to examine the full history of rights theory, two historical examples will suffice. The Magna Carta - probably the first legal implementation of rights as we conceive of them today - protected every "free man" from being imprisoned, striped of possessions, exiled, or made the object of force "except by lawful judgment...or the laws of the land." Five hundred years later, the US Constitution does similarly. It doesn't put a blanket restriction on being deprived of "life, liberty or property" - it instead requires such deprivations to be made according to "due process of law." Rights are - as a matter of history, common understanding, and common implementation throughout the world - a legal concept. Thus, my opponent is incorrect when he states that, for instance, taxes are theft, because although he is being deprived of his property, it is through the operation of due process of law. Our democratically elected representatives established a legal taxation scheme that applies to all equally, and it is administered according to the legal standards developed by Courts and agencies in applying that law. Simple, consistent, rule of law. Taxation does not violate my rights or Pro's, because due process is accorded. And if one of us were to cease paying taxes, our liberty might be taken away, but again, only after a criminal trial in a court of law represented by an attorney before an impartial jury of fellow citizens, and according to rules and sentencing guidelines that have been publicly established and made freely available. Rule of law. The jurors' rights are not being violated, for they are compelled to attend by legal process. Rule of law. Rights are, then, are not like a scientific law - they don't pre-exist, awaiting discovery. They are created by us, by the consensus of society over time and implemented in our legal codes. Like "honor" or "detective stories" or "Tuesday," they are socially created concepts that only have meaning only to the extent that we agree as to what they mean. These meanings may be firmly culturally entrenched, perhaps, but subject to changes in our collective understanding. As a modern understanding of human rights was codified into international law in the aftermath of World War II, we, as members of an international community, identified healthcare and education as among the human rights worth furthering and working to ensure for every person. Every democratic nation on the planet - and many that are not - has implemented systems via government to ensure that these rights are satisfied. They have become part of the consensus of rights protected widely throughout the world. Because of that broadly shared consensus, I hold that healthcare and education are rights.