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Federal health workers are civil servants. The restrictions on their rights are of an employer-employee variety, or of a contractural variety. Nobody put a gun

by SllX 7y ago

Federal health workers are civil servants. The restrictions on their rights are of an employer-employee variety, or of a contractural variety. Nobody put a gun to their head and told them to enter the civil service, and they can choose to leave it. Again, go read the Bill of Rights. They are restrictions on the national government’s ability to legislate or take certain actions against you, not a grant of rights doled out to satisfy you. “You have the freedom to speak and of the press, etc.” is far less powerful and meaningful than “Congress shall make no law...”

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> The restrictions on their rights are of an employer-employee variety An arrangement defined and described by laws Congress wrote. Laws which restrict the free speech of Americans. I agree that the negative rights of the American Constitution are far superior to the positive-rights philosophy of e.g. the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which is unenforceable ambiguous. But these rights are balanced against each other in a complex way.
- SllX 7y ago
  It is entirely within the scope of a government to enact restrictions on the people acting on behalf of the government with government power. This is less of a contradiction than you seem to think it is. In fact, it is the point of the Constitution to restrict the government! Even so, Congress still doesn’t have the power to prevent government employees from speaking out politically, or choosing their own church or choosing not to participate in church, or from operating a printing press that criticizes Congress, or from publishing a blog criticizing the Senators from their home State. The restrictions upon government employees are entirely within the scope of their service to the government, and no further. Or to put it another way, since Congress shall pass no law restricting the establishment of a religion, they can’t mandate civil servants in the Department of Agriculture attend a Catholic Church while those in the Department of Justice must be of a Protestant persuasion.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > It is entirely within the scope of a government to enact restrictions on the people acting on behalf of the government with government power HIPAA restricts what non-government people can say.
    - whateveracct 7y ago
      That's one right (speech) weighed vs another (privacy)
    - SllX 7y ago
      You’ve made a solid observation, and I don’t have a solid response off hand. It’s entirely possible the penalties applied by HIPAA could fall within the boundaries of what is and what isn’t Constitutional, but it’s also possible it is unconstitutional, and unconstitutional laws get struck down all the time when they’re thoroughly challenged, but in our legal system, they have to be challenged first, meaning someone has to make the case.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        Most of the HIPAA restrictions can be waived by the patient, i.e. you can contract around it, so it's really more about contractual defaults and consent than censorship. But that's obviously still a slippery slope. You get the same sort of scenario with classified documents which are at the same time evidence of government misconduct. Everyone with access to the documents agreed not to disclose them, which means there is no one who can reveal the misconduct to the public without violating that agreement.
lordlimecat 7y ago
They can't choose tobe exempt from laws criminalizing the disclosure of classified documents. It is substantially more than just an employer relationship.

by SllX 7y ago

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> The restrictions on their rights are of an employer-employee variety An arrangement defined and described by laws Congress wrote. Laws which restrict the free speech of Americans. I agree that the negative rights of the American Constitution are far superior to the positive-rights philosophy of e.g. the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which is unenforceable ambiguous. But these rights are balanced against each other in a complex way.

SllX 7y ago
It is entirely within the scope of a government to enact restrictions on the people acting on behalf of the government with government power. This is less of a contradiction than you seem to think it is. In fact, it is the point of the Constitution to restrict the government! Even so, Congress still doesn’t have the power to prevent government employees from speaking out politically, or choosing their own church or choosing not to participate in church, or from operating a printing press that criticizes Congress, or from publishing a blog criticizing the Senators from their home State. The restrictions upon government employees are entirely within the scope of their service to the government, and no further. Or to put it another way, since Congress shall pass no law restricting the establishment of a religion, they can’t mandate civil servants in the Department of Agriculture attend a Catholic Church while those in the Department of Justice must be of a Protestant persuasion.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > It is entirely within the scope of a government to enact restrictions on the people acting on behalf of the government with government power HIPAA restricts what non-government people can say.
  - whateveracct 7y ago
    That's one right (speech) weighed vs another (privacy)
  - SllX 7y ago
    You’ve made a solid observation, and I don’t have a solid response off hand. It’s entirely possible the penalties applied by HIPAA could fall within the boundaries of what is and what isn’t Constitutional, but it’s also possible it is unconstitutional, and unconstitutional laws get struck down all the time when they’re thoroughly challenged, but in our legal system, they have to be challenged first, meaning someone has to make the case.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      Most of the HIPAA restrictions can be waived by the patient, i.e. you can contract around it, so it's really more about contractual defaults and consent than censorship. But that's obviously still a slippery slope. You get the same sort of scenario with classified documents which are at the same time evidence of government misconduct. Everyone with access to the documents agreed not to disclose them, which means there is no one who can reveal the misconduct to the public without violating that agreement.

lordlimecat 7y ago

They can't choose tobe exempt from laws criminalizing the disclosure of classified documents. It is substantially more than just an employer relationship.