I admit, I may seem like a party pooper. After America did so well at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, I now have the temerity to say I don’t think U.S. government money should go to the Olympics. Why, you ask? Because sport is not a proper function of government. Show me “sports and recreation” in the Bill of Rights or U.S. Constitution.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Olympics and I love sport. But still, there should be zero taxpayer dollars spent on the American Olympic Team.

Now, if you subscribe to the Euro-Socialist notion of rights, then you might disagree, thinking there’s a right to recreation, or that sport is a proper function of government. In the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and many European Constitutions, they have what I call the “Euro-Socialist” rights to: health care, a job, housing, and recreation/vacation. Yes, a “right” to a vacation. Is that ridiculous, or what? These four rights are nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or anywhere in American law.

So liberals, when you say “we have a right to health care,” you’re wrong. Cite for me where that right comes from. In what legal document, statute, or constitution do you derive that right? A right is not a right because you want it to be.

Socialist rights like these make real rights (like the right to free speech/conscience, equal protection, right to privacy, right to private property, right not be tortured, right to self defense) taken less seriously, thus more likely to be eroded.

And you can’t have a true “right” to health care. That would mean you could force a surgeon, at gunpoint, to operate on you. But that would violate her pre-existing right not to be enslaved. You’d violate her right to bodily integrity. Thus, health care is an entitlement, not a right. A good thing, yes, but not a right. True “rights” are timeless, universal and don’t require a government entitlement program or the violation of another’s preexisting rights.

My right to free speech, for example, doesn’t mean the state must provide me with a printing press or Web site, just that if I publish or get a Web site up, the state can’t tear it down. My right to self defense/own a gun, doesn’t mean the government must give me a pistol, only that they can’t take mine away.

In short, no tax money should be spent on subsidizing vacation, recreation, sport or other luxury items; and health care, a job and a roof, are not rights.

So liberals, quit saying “health care is a right.” Because it ain’t. Never was, never will be Not under American law. And that’s the way it should be. Promoting fake rights trivializes real ones. We must resist this kind of rights inflation.

Jeff E. Jared is an attorney and political writer in Kirkland who writes from a libertarian and law-and-economics perspective.