Image Source: CNN.com

When the produce gleaned from someone else’s labor and resources gets declared a human right, an unfunny thing then happens – Slavery! After the effluvium-flood of fail that was ObamaCare Anno I; this lesson should have been written on the prominent, sloping foreheads of the brilliant people who make public policy in DC. But floating atop that flotsam and jetsam the way scum bubbles rise to the top of a drainage ditch, we get Martin O’Malley. He has governed a state right next door to DC and has obviously not learned a thing.

He’s promising someone else’s efforts and intellect as a human right in preparation for a run at the Democratic Party’s 2016 Nomination for President. Here we go with the reflexive economic stupid that apparently arrives in the email along with a Democratic Party membership kit.

Younger people are choosing to live in cities. They realize that connections to each other are making us better. That WiFi is a human right. That proximity is important to entrepreneurship, access to capital and talent and diversity. There is an opportunity there for us as a nation to embrace that new perspective.”

To understand the sadness of O’Malley’s mental dwarfism here, we need to take a look at why Wi-Fi would have to be a Positive Liberty* instead of a negative one.** Here is a description of what Wi-Fi actually is.

The Wi-Fi Alliance defines Wi-Fi as any “wireless local area network (WLAN) products that are based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) 802.11 standards”.[1] However, since most modern WLANs are based on these standards, the term “Wi-Fi” is used in general English as a synonym for “WLAN”. Only Wi-Fi products that complete Wi-Fi Alliance interoperability certification testing successfully may use the “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED” trademark.

So very smart people have to spend their valuable time reading the IEEE 802.11 Standards, designing a delivery system for this network IAW FCC standards, testing this system out, and then building transmitters to emit at the requisite freqs. Afterwards, they have to maintain and improve them to maintain technological concurrency with all the possible Internet Service Providers and machinery that would seek to access this service.

This involves a sacrifice of money, talent and time to make happen. That would imply that the people doing this should be reasonably compensated for their production and earn an acceptable level of profit. That is, until El Presidente O’Malley makes it a human right. How much do you expect to pay for a human right? Unless you want to get very abstract here and count the portion of your 2014 tax return that funded the US Defense Budget, your rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not line items that show up on a bill in your mailbox. Therefore, whoever was providing your WiFi could not charge you for it. The service wouldn’t become available without cost, so anyone who produced it would logically only do so under governmental coercion.

That used to happen in America. It happened on Tara Plantation before certain things were gone with the wind. Coercing people to provide goods and services that are someone else’s human rights requires slavery. It requires the government to take the money or the objects out of another person’s hide without remuneration. This is what positive liberties and Positive Rights actually are. They are slavery justified by Academic Goebbelsspeak. The Democratic Party is essentially an organization that believes the government is perfectly justified in stealing from its people to provide “Human Rights” to a target sub-class of voters. This is something to ponder before you are ever stupid or gullible enough to vote for Martin O’Malley or any other Democrat running for office.

*-Positive Liberties are the ones government steals for you from a person who is more intelligent and productive than you are.
**-Negative Liberties are ones where the government refrains from taking your bright ideas and hard work for someone else’s benefit.