"Theodore Dalrymple" comments on a recent spate of articles in The Lancet ("one of the most influential medical journals in the world") advocating a universal right to "health":

Much of the edition for 4th - 10th August 2007 was filled with articles about the supposed human right to health. Never was Bentham's dictum about the talk of rights being nonsense on stilts better illustrated. One of articles quoted the World Health Organization's definition of health to the effect that it is not simply the absence of disease or infirmity, but the presence of complete physical, mental and social well-being; and the same paragraph stated that: "the highest attainable level of health is the fundamental right of every human being."

Hey! Little did I know that I am entitled to complete social well being. If I don't have a lover and desire one, or am do not feel sufficiently well-liked by my peers, well, my rights are being violated! And someone else has an obligation to fix that.

How wonderful for the lawyers, and others who derive power from the state:

It follows from what they professed that the non-fulfilment of any human desire whatsoever represents an assault on human rights, in so far as a thwarted desire causes unhappiness, which is to say a decline from complete mental well-being. (As Blake said, better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire.) And since it is the duty of governments to ensure that everyone reaches "the highest attainable standard of health", it is clear also that every government has a duty to interfere in practically every aspect of life, in all its tiniest nooks and crannies.

The doctrine of rights, which started out as an attempt to defend the citizen against arbitrary governmental power, has thus been transformed into the [justification for] arbitrary government power. To adapt slightly the words of Dostoyevsky with regard to freedom and despotism, starting from infinite rights we arrive at infinite subjection. In the process - and not entirely coincidentally - absolute power will pass into the hands of an elite of infinitely benevolent administrators.

One would presume that physicians are generally reasonably intelligent people, and those appearing in (and editing) The Lancet, no less so.

But there is a tremendous gap between "intelligence" and "wisdom".