Agitating for Freedom

We need but one thing to enable our achievement: Freedom. Everything else follows from that, including money, education and relationships. The Paraducers know this and work to nibble at our freedoms bit by bit, reducing our space and making us more dependent upon them for survival.

You know how to kill a horse? Get a very large pot of room temperature water and immerse the horse. Then turn up the heat slowly, Eventually the water will boil and the horse will die, not noticing the gradual temperature change. (I’ve heard you can also do this with frogs.) That’s what Paraducers are doing to us Producers, bit by bit.

The Supreme Court recently decided in Kelo v. New London that the government can seize private property if the new use will generate more tax revenue, even if not for a direct public use.

Justice Stevens wrote in the majority opinion that:

“...[T]his Court long ago rejected any literal requirement that condemned property be put into use for the...public.”

The city of New London wanted the private property not for a direct public use, as specified in the Constitution, but to provide an indirect public benefit. Stevens and the majority swallowed this reasoning whole:

“The city’s determination that the area at issue was sufficiently distressed to justify a program of economic rejuvenation is entitled to deference. The city has carefully formulated a development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including, but not limited to, new jobs and increased tax revenue.”

That means that your property, if it can be developed to generate more tax revenue, can be taken for that public purpose. There was nothing inherently defective about these properties, as Stevens admits:

“There is no allegation that any of these properties is blighted or otherwise in poor condition; rather, they were condemned only because they happen to be located in the development area.”

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, and decried the Court’s willingness to ignore our rights:

“Today’s decision is simply the latest in a string of our cases construing the Public Use Clause to be a virtual nullity, without the slightest nod to its original meaning. In my view, the Public Use Clause, originally understood, is a meaningful limit on the government’s eminent domain power. Our cases have strayed from the Clause’s original meaning, and I would reconsider them.”

Private property ownership is a freedom being eroded. Why are they doing this? Because a Producer takes his wealth and accumulates property, and revoking property rights subjugates Producers anew.

In my home county in Virginia, a proposal was before the county supervisors to create a mountain overlay district, a zoning device to limit development above a certain altitude in the surrounding mountains. The motivation is to keep developers from populating the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains with condo farms that we would all have to look at for the next two centuries.

Great motivation, but the proposal’s net effect was to limit property owner rights and reduce the value of their land. Now I don’t want to look at condos on every mountain top, but the people who paid taxes on that land for decades are the ones who get to decide how it is developed, not me. If I don’t like it, I can leave.

Thankfully, property owners turned out in force and shouted down the supervisors, killing the overlay district.

That’s good because, don’t you just know, the regulation would have eventually been expanded not only to control development on the mountains visible from the valley, but development in the valley visible from the mountains. That’s the way the Paraducers work. Bait and switch, get the camel’s nose under the tent and before you know it you can’t sleep for all that snoring and snuffling.

Another proposal came from a small town in our county whose land area is measured in some tenths of a square mile. It’s a tiny little village whose business proprietors are mainly attorneys. The proposal suggested expanding the town’s area by a factor of ten, while providing little if any services increase to the annexed residents. This land grab was so poorly thought out that one property owner complained his house would be on one side of the new town border, and his well and septic system on the other.

County citizens came out in force and persuaded the supervisors to vote the proposal down, but it lost by two votes to three, a thin margin.

In that case, the freedoms of dozens of land owners were pitted against the tax and spend whims of a small group of Paraducers in a small town, and they nearly won because the supervisors are cut from the same Paraducer cloth.

The proposal will be back before us soon, I predict, as it looked to me like this was only a warm-up round to acclimate the county’s taxpayers to the idea of an expanded town. Next time, the town will request a smaller chunk, perhaps only five or seven times its current size, and the supervisors will praise it for its modesty and well thought out plans (plans that have the Producers paying the bill).

Estimates are that the federal and state governments own as much as 40% of all land in the United States. I’m not in favor of snowmobiles in Yellowstone, or four wheelers in every national park, but taking this much of the land of the country out of the hands of Producers can only be seen as an assault on freedom. All this land is “managed” by Paraducers in the government, meaning that they auction off usage rights to the highest bidder, in an effort to collect money and consolidate their power. As the environmentalists decry, much of this land is not being held in pristine condition, but is being developed, it’s just happening at the hands of government.

Producers, we have to keep our eyes open to see these cases of eroding freedoms. When we see them, we have to hammer the Paraducers in ways that will hurt them, at the ballot box, in public meetings, in public forums (blogs, web sites, newspapers), with our neighbors, and financially. Most times the government Paraducers are to blame, but sometimes Paraducer corporations are involved, and they must be attacked in every legal way possible to limit their power and freedom grabs.

States are already working to limit the impact of the Kelo decision, running ahead of a tsunami of voter anger. That’s the way it should be.