The early days of the internet made a promise to America and the world, that it would eventually provide access to the accumulated wisdom of mankind. Our art. Our music. Our ideas. Our knowledge. All of it. There for the taking, should you choose to partake. They were heady times.

As the mothership of social justice, UC Berkeley found itself in an awkward position when the Department of Justice dropped the hammer on its free online content.  Berkeley’s response was a threat: let it go or else.

The University of California, Berkeley has announced that it may eliminate free online content rather than comply with a U.S. Justice Department order that it make the content accessible to those with disabilities.

DoJ refused to blink, as it had law, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the demands of social justice on its side. It would not acquiesce. Berkeley made good on its promise.

On March 15, the university will begin removing the more than 20,000 audio and video files from those platforms — a process that will take three to five months — and require users sign in with University of California credentials to view or listen to them.

As Hans Bader explains, the clash of social justice “rights” and reality hit a wall.

If the blind and deaf couldn’t fully access audio and video, then no one should be able to, according the Justice Department’s perverse position. Ironically, the Justice Department’s demand was particularly harmful to some categories of disabled people, such as those with mobility impairments.

If the argument is framed in a certain way, don’t the disabled deserve the same access as everyone else?, one would be inclined to respond affirmatively. This isn’t a conspiracy to deprive the hearing or vision impaired from access, a detriment imposed upon them. But framed differently, can we make everything on the internet accessible to every person, no matter what their particular needs may be?, the limits of reality, from the laws of physics to limits of financial burdens, can’t be ignored.

The Obama administration viewed it as better to have no accommodation for the disabled, then an imperfect accommodation.

Why? Because the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Two employees of Gallaudet University—a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C.—filed a complaint with DOJ alleging that Berkeley’s online content was inaccessible to the hearing-disabled community. After looking into the matter, DOJ determined that Berkeley had indeed violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Berkeley had two choices: spend a fortune adding closed captioning to the videos, or remove them from public view. Cost-conscious administrators chose the latter option.

Robby Soave contends that this isn’t what Congress intended in enacting the ADA, but rather a good idea taken to its extreme, and a federal regulation that failed to include some sort of safety valve to prevent the harm caused by the DoJ’s excessive demands.

I can’t imagine the authors of the ADA intended to destroy a valuable public resource because it wasn’t perfectly accessible to all, but here we are. Taking the quality out of equality: that’s clumsy federal regulation for you.

Whether this is true or simply an obvious by-product of unintended consequences doesn’t make much of a difference. It’s more likely that the arguments favoring access to the disabled, rich with emotional rhetoric about their exclusion from the resources enjoyed by the rest of us, was all that mattered.

Had someone opposed the ADA based on its application taken to the logical extreme, the harm it would do to the huge majority of people, not to mention the disabled who were homebound and relied on alternative access, it wouldn’t have mattered. Indeed, they would likely have been shouted down as blind-haters and deaf-haters.

Articles would appear in the New York Times that began with sad stories of deeply sympathetic mothers and children who only wanted to learn online to escape poverty and misogyny, but were denied their right to be like white cis-heteronormative males with good hearing. And you would have cried for them, taken to the streets, worn pink ear-muffs and broken Starbucks windows to show your tolerance for the disabled challenged.

As explained by my bastardized Herzberg theory, not every rhetorical “right” that a person can demand can be afforded without a cost to someone else’s similarly sympathetic rhetorical “right.” It’s remarkably easy to express a sad story, an apparently reasonable expectation that no person will not be afforded whatever benefit society can confer that would make their life, their experience, as wonderful as they would like it to be.

Whether it’s compelling Berkeley to add closed-captioning to every video, or silence words that hurt feelings or ideas that offend, a cost is associated. The cost may be the loss of one person’s right to speak thoughts that another finds wrong, or financial as in Berkeley’s case. Of course, Berkeley could choose to spend the money to add closed-captioning to every one of its 20,000 videos made available for free on the internet to everyone, but someone, somewhere, would have to pay for its largesse.

That someone would include the students, or their parents, who pay tuition to Berkeley. Shouldn’t those privileged souls be willing to put their money where their empathy toward the deaf is? Except they include the poor students, the marginalized, who come from poverty and can’t afford to pay the associated costs. The point is that every choice, every sad story, is interconnected with every other choice, every other sad story.

Pretending otherwise doesn’t change the price that must ultimately be paid. And so Berkeley blinked, the free online courses will come down, and we will all be the poorer for it. The complainants at Gallaudet will gain nothing, and everyone else will lose something. Social justice has been achieved, and we are all the worse off for it.