Difference between phony and true rights

It is the pathetic state of current discourse that something as obvious as this needs to be explained-

Your article Saturday on CSU Monterey Bay students who are unhappy with a private company's inspections of the student housing they live in contains a telling quote. Student spokesman Michael Frederiksen states, "We all deserve safe and secure housing." But to say that someone deserves something is to say that others have a duty to provide it. Who has that duty? Frederiksen thinks that taxpayers owe it to him and his fellow students. But why do students' decisions to attend a heavily subsidized Cal State University automatically impose a duty on taxpayers who do not attend?

Frederiksen is advocating a "phony right." What's the difference between a phony right and a real right? A real right is, say, my right not to be murdered. The only responsibility that imposes on you and others is not to murder me. In other words, it's a responsibility not to do something. The "right" to good housing, though, is a phony right because it implies that someone else has a positive duty to provide it. And let's not hide behind government. The only way government can provide things is by forcibly taking from others.

More the phony 'rights' are created, more the real rights are trodden upon.

India is embarking on a very large scale expansion of phony 'rights' in the Right to Food Bill that is  likely to pass sometime this year. Foolishness on a massive scale - but par for course for a government run by an 'eminent' economist.

So Google wants to take over the world?

Reading this one gets that ominous tingly feeling - we have seen too many movies about creepy corporates that, while providing a useful nay indispensable service, really want to take over the world(RoboCop I can think of offhand but I have seen others).

Google may still track your location, even if you prevent Latitude from blabbing to your friends. When you open a map, a little flashing crosshairs appears just to let you know that Google has you in its sights. But the tracking doesn’t stop when you close the map. Google monitors your location continuously, day and night, even if no apps are running.

-- snip --

Good programmers like finding clever ways to nudge users. If you visit Latitude’s Web page on your PC, for example, Google will ask you for permission to share your location. If you click “no,” you get an alert box with only one button — “go back.” (And get asked for permission again.) No is not an option.

Even as I type this post in Google Chrome to be published on a Google Blogger blog, with images found by using Google search and using Gmail as my primary mail, I have to say creepy sounds about right.

Google's motto is - Don't Be Evil.

But it is putting in place an apparatus and a network to potentially do a lot of evil.