News that Oregon could become the first state to declare affordable health care a “right” certainly puts the spotlight on one of our favorite features of the United States Constitution — the negative way in which it protects our liberty. Call what’s being mapped at Salem the new Oregon Trail. It would follow the Marxist route of what are called positive rights, those created by the state and doled out like government benefits. 

America’s Bill of Rights takes the negative approach to civil liberties. These negatives are prohibitions on the government from abridging what Jefferson called the “unalienable Rights” with which all men are “endowed” by their “Creator.” Our Constitution bars our government from abridging such rights. The First Amendment’s opening words are: “Congress shall make no law . . .” That is the quintessence of a negative right.

In going for positive rights, Oregon is presenting its unfortunate citizens with such a right as could be easily washed away, like a pile of sticks such as beavers make across a rill. The Beaver State’s measure is in the form of a proposed amendment to the state Constitution. It’s up for ratification November 8. “What?” you might exclaim. “How could it be possible that Oregon needs a new amendment?” Its own bill of rights is 6,000 words long.

That’s nearly 12 times the length of our Bill of Rights. Yet Oregon wants to add to its bill of rights a new “obligation of the state” to “ensure that every resident of Oregon has access to cost-effective, clinically appropriate and affordable health care as a fundamental right.” It goes on, the AP reports, to require that the obligation “must be balanced against the public interest in funding public schools and other essential public services.”

That’s bad enough. It fails, though, to define “cost-effective, clinically appropriate and affordable,” or mark who is supposed to be footing the bill. The measure’s main backer calls it “a value statement,” the AP reports, and denies it’s meant to push Oregon to  “single-payer” health care, a socialist panacea. Critics say it “could trigger legal and political woes,” plus “open the door to lawsuits,” the AP reports. No money is raised to implement it.  

The measure’s prime mover, Senator Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, is unfazed. Once the measure is etched in the state parchment, the door opens for tax increases to cover the cost of the new “right.” Queried on that by the AP, Ms. Steiner Hayward was forthright. “Can I guarantee no new taxes? No. I don’t make promises like that.” No wonder the state’s health care employees’ unions are salivating at the prospect of the measure passing.

The Republican candidate for governor, Christine Drazan, is against the health care amendment “because of potential budgetary impacts,” the AP says. That could be one reason why the Oregon contest is, along with New York, a “gubernatorial race in a deep blue state” that “has shifted from leaning Democrat to a toss-up,” as our Scott Norvell reports. The Beaver State electorate could turn out to know a bad idea when they see one.

Oregon’s proposal is part of a profusion of positive rights that have sprung up around the globe like skunkweed. Take Canada’s “Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” or the “European Convention on Human Rights” — please. These long-winded rights statements, which exceed in length our Bill of Rights by a factor of two and ten, respectively, manage, incredibly, to overlook, say, the right to keep and bear arms.

Or feature Communist China’s constitution, teeming with positive rights. “The state shall respect and protect human rights,” it pretends. Plus, too, “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.” It is the absence of “negative rights” — limits on the power of the Communist Chinese state — that renders these constitutional promises meaningless.

What is it about the left that loves positive rights? It could have something to do with the paternalistic impulse to make citizens dependent on the state. FDR sought to enshrine “Freedom from Want,” a vindication of the welfare state, alongside the Bill of Rights. Oregon’s doughty pioneers would recoil from today’s rights scam. It reminds us of Eva Peron, who once said: “Where there’s a need, there’s a right.”

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Correction: The capital of Oregon is Salem. An earlier version misstated the name.