A Right To Tourism?

"A right is not something you lack, that the government has to give you. A right is something you already have, that the government is not permitted to take away."

Now, please take a look at the story in this link.

Vacationing a Human Right, EU Chief Says

"The European Union has declared travelling a human right, and is launching a scheme to subsidize vacations with taxpayers' dollars for those too poor to afford their own trips."

This is why it's important to focus on what a right really is.

Among other things, you have a right to free speech. To believe as you choose, religiously or not. To feel secure that your property will not be seized, nor your other rights abridged, without just cause and due process. You have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - which doesn't mean you can't die, or that you'll be able to do anything you please, or that you'll find happiness! But it does basically mean that you can do what you like, as long as you have the means to do it and you're not abridging anyone else's rights by doing it.

None of these rights cost anybody a dime - yet they are the most precious things we have.

The ever-expanding definition of what is ours "by right" is analogous to another high-concept government grail: "the moral equivalent of war." We have witnessed a never-ending effort by government to brand the effort to deal with this or that scourge as "equivalent to war" in importance or urgency - the war on drugs, for instance. William James (an anti-war activist) originally proposed the idea as an alternative to war, a way to serve war's function in a society (getting a populace to rally together in the face of a threat) without actually going to war. But we see in our times that the true use of declaring a moral equivalent of war is to get people to accept that because of the direness of the situation, the government can do whatever it wants - and damn our rights.

It's a distraction tactic - just as "giving us new rights" is a distraction tactic.

Efforts by government officials such as this EU guy to "broaden" the definition of rights attack the problem of rights from another angle besides just distraction: devaluation. And oh, how we eat it up! We love hearing that this or that wonderful privilege or perk has been declared our right! That means someone has to give it to us. Truly we have shit for brains. They come bearing gifts, gifts for free, to be bestowed upon we grateful masses of morons, and they call them "our right." They distract us with these wonderful new rights that they can't actually provide - not uniformly, not well, and not for long (assuming the promised benefit ever materializes at all).

But in the final analysis, that payoff - the failure to make good! - is every bit as important as the distraction that the promise provides. Because as things get steadily worse, it will not seem out-of-line to us that our real rights slip away. Our rights will have first been lost amid the sparkle of the bribes and baubles which have promised to us and called "rights," and finally as the government fails and fails to deliver on what they have promised, we will by then have accepted that that is what rights are: just another thing the government promises but can't deliver.

Next time someone offers you a "new right" for free, think hard about what it is you're really buying into.