Written By : Dave Blount
December 3, 2010

Most causes advanced by do-gooders sound great — until you give a moment’s thought to where their underlying assumptions will lead. For example:

If you’re looking to do something good for a change, the NGO A Human Right, which believes “equal, universal, uninhibited Internet access is a human right,” is in the process of raising $150k in order to purchase “the most capable communications satellite put into space” so they can use it to provide poor people with free Internet service.

Follow the link to A Human Right and you will be greeted by a splash screen yelling that “IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE VERY LUCKY.” Wrong. If you can read it, you got out of bed in the morning, went to work, and earned the money to pay for Internet service. Unless you pay your bills with lottery winnings, luck has nothing to do with it.

It would be nice if everyone had Internet service, but to call it a right subverts real rights. When socialists like Barack Hussein Obama declare that healthcare is a human right, they mean that the government has a right to force some to pay for the goods and services consumed by others — that is, by saying that you have a “right” to healthcare or Internet service, statists are saying that you do not have a right to your own labor and property.

As with healthcare, if Internet service is a “right,” it will inevitably fall to Big Government to make sure everyone can exercise this right. Conveniently for our rulers, this puts them in a position to micromanage healthcare, the Internet, and anything else they promise to make other people pay for.

With liberty, you have a right to access freely expressed information on the Internet, provided you pay for it. With moonbattery, you have a right to use stolen money to access what the government allows you to access.

On a tip from Karpet. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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