When Rights are Wrongs

Vacations are a right?

Just when you thought progressive liberalism couldn’t possibly get any more ridiculous, our European friends have discovered yet another “right” that we as human beings share.

The right to a vacation.

According to this article from the Ottawa Citizen, Antonio Tajani, the European Union commissioner for enterprise and industry, stated that “traveling for tourism today is a right. The way we spend our holidays is a formidable indicator of our quality of life.”

As such, a plan is being implemented that will see EU taxpayers footing some of the vacation bill for seniors, youths between the ages of 18 and 25, disabled people, and families facing “difficult social, financial or personal” circumstances.

Forgive my apparent lack of world class sophistication, but this continual discovery of new “rights” (home ownership, healthcare, vacations, etc) only seems to achieve one possible outcome: the further erosion of our true rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…rights that are indeed inherently ours.

How possibly can something be a right that by definition must be provided by somebody else?  To demand from one person such as is necessary to provide to another does not maintain one’s “rights”, but rather enslaves the provider to the provided.  It is the ultimate denial of the right to liberty.

Government loves to pick and choose winners and losers.  By essentially creating a dependant class of citizen, the political power seekers have simultaneously created a base from which to wield that power. 

All is well and good for a time, but there undeniably will come a day when the providers have nothing left to provide, the moochers revolt over the loss of “rights” that can no longer be afforded them, and the powers that be, having gamed the system for all it’s worth, simply disappear into a life of luxury while the rest of the world falls into chaos.

When any political system arrives at the point where there are more receivers than providers, such a system is unsustainable.  So long as an ever-increasing number of “rights” are being discovered, the eventual fall is only hastened.

We must reassert ourselves as a free people and learn to recognize the difference between a true right and a “right” created only to further another’s political ambitions.