Feeding my drudgereport.com addiction, I was checking the site for updates and saw this article and thought surely, this is a spoof, a joke, a satire story you’d see in the Onion, but from what I can glean, it seems like the European Union is serious. The Ottawa Citizen headline reads “Vacationing a human right, EU Chief Says.” I kept thinking this can’t be a real news story, it just can’t.
The EU proudly boasts travel as a universal human right and proposes to subsidize travel throughout the EU with taxpayer money. Daddy Warbucks, I mean, the EU (entitlement union) is proposing this as a compassionate strategy to increase the quality of life for those who go without vacations due to financial hardship or have an inability to read maps or just like to stay home. The EU says the motivation behind this is to promote cultural appreciation, and increase the quality of life of its people. As an added bonus it will also prop up the tourism industry.
It reads as follows, “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.” So I say to myself- well, today was hard, I think I’m having a personal hardship, time for a government-sponsored road trip! Don’t kids 18-25 need a job instead of a holiday and then they can pay as they go?
Would a workaholic desk jockey who slaves in his cubicle day in and day out without time off be a human rights violation?? How do the refugees in Darfur feel about that? Is the EU going to force you to take vacation? Is tourism going to be the only productivity coming out of the EU? Should we short the euro now or later? Perhaps the EU will devolve into its former nomadic culture and become a vast wasteland of vagabonds who are now free to indulge their wanderlust.
I’m still flabbergasted at the whole concept of the EU granting its people the right to be a tourist, not just basic welfare programs, but now holidays. It gives the phrase, tourist trap, a whole new meaning. My question is – when do the announcements of new human rights stop? Why don’t they keep going and grant each person an Italian villa for a holiday escape. How about vouchers for activities, such as gondola rides, tourist trinkets, postcards, a per diem per se. Basically it sounds like an all-expense paid trip to get out of town. The article continues that they advise the northern Europeans to travel to southern Europe and vice versa. What if they want to go to Vegas or Dubai? Wouldn’t the EU be infringing their on their right to play tourist if they restrict travel only to certain approved areas? What the EU giveth, the EU taketh away.
How do you think this all got started? When a governing body starts granting rights to services, like health care and vacations and a laundry list of things are rolled out to entice a citizen to comply with a government’s rules to play along, one becomes an automaton to be controlled. Instead of a short-lived video game, the government’s game is for keeps.
