Opinion: No free vacation this year? Your human rights may have been violated (at least in Europe)
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Finally, some common sense in this world.
If you’re tired of your human rights being trampled on -- like not being able to take free vacations every year -- then you’re in luck. At least if you’re over in Europe, anyway.
The Times of London is reporting that the European Union could declare tourism to be a basic human right, and if you can’t afford to travel, then government should take care of the expense for you.
Under the pilot program, citizens living in Northern Europe will be encouraged to travel to Southern Europe and vice versa.
Not only do you get a free trip, but the program will help “promote a sense of pride in European culture and bridge the north-south divide in the continent and prop up resorts in their off-season.”
When you think about it, it all makes sense.
“Why should someone from the Mediterranean not be able to travel to Edinburgh in summer for a breath of cool, fresh air; why should someone from Edinburgh not be able to travel to Greece in winter?” asked the spokesman for the the European Union commissioner responsible for the measure.
No kidding. Why should anyone have to pay out of their own pockets to take a vacation? Oh, the humanity.
Sure, there are some Negative Nancies out there. Predictably, from the doomsayers over at Fox News.
“That is what happens when government looks after you,” Neil Cavuto writes. “It looks after ‘all’ of you and ‘all’ you do. Your ‘stimulus’ and now your ‘suitcase.’
“And before you know it, your rights include everything from raising your fist in protest to your drink in delight,” he adds.
And Fox’s John Stossel gets all historical about it instead of thinking progressively.
“It’s amazing how watered-down the idea of ‘rights’ has become since Jefferson wrote about ‘certain unalienable Rights… among these Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ But at least the U.S. government isn’t giving away vacations yet,” he writes.
Sadly, Stossel is probably right.
Although Dan Proft over at WLS radio might know something otherwise. After all, WLS is in Chicago. He might have a source. And if so, the president’s on the case.
Writes Proft: “Obama administration officials are scrambling in the wake of the latest offering by the European Union in what has become a game of one-upmanship between the fertile imaginations of statists creating wonderful new ‘rights’ heretofore misunderstood as merely opportunities.”
Good. Put me down for two tickets to the World Series and I prefer Jet Blue.
-- Jimmy Orr
Why should it stop at vacations? We think it is a basic human right to get Twitter alerts of each new Ticket item too. Just follow us at @latimestot. You can also join our Facebook FAN page here.
