I am responding to Lee Feder’s Aug. 29 column (“Civilization’s finish: How far we have come yet still have to go”).

He hit the issue on the head; health care is a privilege, not a right. I have no more of a ‘right to health care’ or a welfare check than I have a right to steal from or enslave my fellow men. The right that we all have is the right to peacefully acquire resources from voluntary trade and our own hard work.

As one who believes very firmly in the constitutional principles upon which this nation was based, I see no right to health care or welfare handouts anywhere in the constitution. This is a fictitious right created by socialists that has no bearing or relation to the nature of man as a rational being. Man is capable of reason, able to engage in voluntary contracts and is therefore fully entitled to the fruits of his own labor.

If Lee wants to start a charity to provide for the uninsured, he is fully within his rights to do so and I would support him. However, all I see is a person with his hand out asking the government to rob me at gunpoint to enforce his so called right.

America is a constitutional republic founded upon the twin concepts of individual liberty and limited government. If the cause of liberty is lost then America will surely fall.

Jon Steffen

Senior in LAS