Monday, March 8, 2010

Yet Another 'Fundamental' Right

According to the BBC:

Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.

The survey - of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries - found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.

Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens.
International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.

"The right to communicate cannot be ignored," Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News.

"The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created."

He said that governments must "regard the internet as basic infrastructure - just like roads, waste and water".
"We have entered the knowledge society and everyone must have access to participate."

Once again a failure to distinguish actual (negative) rights (i.e. the right to be left alone) from created (positive) rights, the right to stuff we want that someone else (who, apparently, has no rights to be left alone) should give us. Let's make this as simple as possible, if you believe you have a right to something that someone else has to produce than it cannot be a right unless that person is a slave. See the contradiction? That is the purpose of markets, to allow people who want things to get them from people who produce them at mutually acceptable terms.

But while we're voting, I want to add my vote for a fundamental right to Ferrari's. Governments must regard the  ability to drive at dangerously fast speeds in amazing babe magnets as a fundamental right!

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