I wonder how much of that resistance to getting a warrant was simply because the property owner was being a righteous pain in the ass.
Admittedly that should never be a factor in decision making, but you’d have to be, well, an idiot to think that isn’t a factor in small towns.
Isn’t this when Dave Markell jumps in the thread and tells us all how this guy isn’t a real Libertarian?
Libertarian Property Rights lead inexorably to wackos doing mysterious, disquieting things which you can’t do anything about because YOU NEED TO GET OFF MY GODDAMN PROPERTY!
I’m sure big-L libertarians will get all huffy with me, but frankly, the property rights stuff is not why I like libertarianism more in principle than competing political philosophies. They’re really nice and all, and important, but I don’t think that they’re the most important facet. You just need to apply a little “Lack of Harm” to the core tenets and that sort of balances everything out.
In this instance, he should have the right to do damn well anything he pleases with his property so long as it does not negatively effect the property of those around him.
If he was, as it has been suggested, dumping sewage or letting sewage improperly drain thereby effecting the water table and causing pollution noticeable to his neighbor, then while the Health Inspector was a lazy bitch for not getting a warrant, the ends were justified, and this jackoff had it coming, even if he was right in principle.
So, in a Libertarian world, when the only evidence that anything is awry is a backhoe and some piles of dirt (as is the case here), please tell me how someone would get a warrant?
I’m really leery of Property Rights. I could swallow almost anything else in the Libertarian platform but that. Property Rights == you have no right to know what I’m doing on my property until you taste my feces in your well water, at which point the damage has already been done.
Ah yes, the old “military flag vs. civilian flag” argument, that one is very popular with Militia types.
I don’t really think that a warrantless search should have a lower bar than getting a warrant. Warrantless searches are traditionally for time-critical situations involving probable cause.
Well, that would be something regarding building inspections that needs to be addressed with local and/or state laws. If you need a backhoe for something, odds are it’s something the county has a right to at least send a building inspector type person to check out. Just because someone has certain rights to do things on their property doesn’t mean there can’t be checks and balances to address potential abuses.
And I believe the neighbor noticed contaminated groundwater, which once the inspectors test the neighbor’s and find it is indeed contaminated, that seems like pretty good cause to search adjacent properties <b>with a properly obtained court order</b>.
I’m just speaking in hypothetics here.
Obviously, the damage is done at that point, but I think there are certain things which trump the <b>potential</b> for abuse, and some level of property rights are among them.
That said, when you’re found guilty of this stuff, as this douchebag was, I think the goverment’s got just cause for suing you to reclaim enough money to fix the damage you did.
With great property rights come great responsibility or some shit.
True enough. Of course, the cost of cleaning up the mess always is many times more than the cost of making the mess, and generally the folks that make the mess have no ability to pay (whether it’s some random “freeman” building a septic tank that’s not up to code, or a mining company who is using cyanide-leech techniques to extract copper).
And the problem with the Property Rights movement is it goes hand-in-hand with the Recompense movement. Basically, the “You don’t want me to use Cyanide leeching on my property? Well, then pay me for the mineral rights on My Land” argument, which is bullshit.
I’ve just got a real issue with that. Of course, I’m more at the other extreme (I’d prefer that the state retain ownership of all land, with commensurate public control over how that land can be used), which I know puts me in a tiny minority (in this country, at least).
State ownership of all land? That’s waaaay out there. I don’t like to invoke the c word because of the near-godwin like ability it has to destroy threads but that’s pretty much communist thinking there.
It’s literally communist. And it’s been tried. Doesn’t work. Among other things, it ensures no one will farm worth a crap, ever. No thanks, my little bit of Texas is my own.
I like how machfive can just keep posting away, ignoring supertanker’s post. I mean, like what does supertanker know…
I think Communism is unlikely to work too, but it hasn’t really been tried at all. So you can’t say it fails for that reason.
What then would you call the Kibbutz movement?
Yes, it’s of course entirely impossible to have state ownership of property and yet continue to have an economic system that provides incentives for people to work.
People who live in parts of London that are owned by the Crown and whose “ownership” of their property is actually a revocable lease, are living in a Communist state?
The US Forestry service maintains our national forests as a public trust, and confers limited mineral and logging rights to individuals/corporations, while (in theory) making sure that the common good is being served and that environmental regulations are upheld. Is this communism too?
Golly. I learn such great things from Qt3.
Never heard about that one. Just out of curiosity - what is that argument about?
the dept of the interior is usually the worst run, isn’t it? i remember one article mentioning it and the dept of defense were the two departments the government couldn’t get a clean audit from. in order to pay for upkeep it had to get money from logging which made roads and other messes that had to be cleaned up … by selling more logging rights. this was pre-bush, too.
Such as making ridiculous comparisons between “the abolition of all private property and small business in pursuit of criminalizing the profit motive” and “a few government-owned entities within a larger free market”?
Admittedly your own personal mortgage-free utopia said little about small business holders, but once you deny people the ability to own their own land (something that’s been important to people since, oh, the freaking DARK AGES) all sorts of other fun meddling in people’s lives impulses tend to follow. See: “War communism”.
The example I gave on farming is very relevant. If you remove from farmers the ability to make decisions about their own land (which was the very basis of Communism - you know, moving farmers to more efficient “communes”, thus the Commun- part of the word) you also remove from them the motivation to work very hard, or at all. They no longer are entrepreneurs, but instead are wage slaves. And whenever that’s been tried, it has killed agriculture day-ud. (Israel being an exception, but not really one on which to base a larger society on, and one that’s breaking down in Israel as well now.)
Why would no one farm worth a crap without private ownership of land? Perhaps I’m mistaken but I thought corporate agriculture has been on the rise for decades in this country. Lots of people work land they don’t own.
But I’m just playing devils advocate and nitpicking the details. I agree communism wouldn’t work :)
You aren’t going to pull me in to a defense of Communism, because ultimately that’s not what I’m talking about. You called it Communism, because in Texas everything to the left of the Democratic party is Communist, apparently.
There’s a difference between “giving farmers (and other entrepreneurs) the ability to direct their own actions and reap the benefit of their decisions” and “giving landowners carte blanche to do what they want, because they ‘own the land’”
Ultimately, I think the state should own the land. People should be given leases on the land to do what they want to it, subject to restrictions imposed by the state (environmental, zoning, what have you). Basically, very similar to what we have now, except there’s no such thing as “property rights” because individuals don’t own the land, they are merely the stewards for future generations and as such are accountable to society at large for their actions.
Because I’m fucking tired of hearing some dumbass redneck fight against reasonable environmental regulations, because it’s “his land”. Because you know what? It’s not your fucking land. The land was there before you came around, and it’ll be here long after you’re dust.
I don’t want to “criminalize the profit motive” or whatever crypto-fascist jargon you want to throw at me. But I don’t put “the right to own property” on a pedestal the way some people do.
Clearly you’ve never been to Austin. In any event, you postulated a world without private property. That’s kind of the textbook definition of Communism. Sorry if you disagree, maybe you should take it up with economists!
Wow, slams against where I live, references to dumbass rednecks, and ending with calling me a fascist for averring that I like owning things. It’s like a three for one special on Godwin!
The right to own property is the foundation of personal freedom, as seen in such obscure documents as the Magna Carta. If you think that is “putting it on a pedestal”, well, as you’ve conclusively proven, rational discussion is somewhat pointless. As the original subject of this post had proven to them, you can quite easily have personal ownership of property while still regulating it for the common good. Like, uh, in every nation on the planet. You don’t actually have to take away everyone’s rights to make sure Goofus doesn’t turn his backyard into a nuclear waste dump.