We have rights.  As Americans we have the freedom to make agreements, to make promises, and to bargain with each other for mutual advantage.  When we give a promise and receive something of value for it, we can use the courts to enforce those agreements.  This is what free citizens do in a free country.

What citizens should not do in a free country is run like helpless children to the government for protection when each new challenge comes along.

Governments are made up of people no more smart or capable than you and me.  What they have is rigid, uniform, arbitrary, black and white LAW, and power.  People are flexible, diverse, and subtle.

Citizens engaged in working the problem to make our land better cannot be sufficiently anticipated by a rigid code of government regulations, no matter how artfully drawn.

The Founding Fathers understood this so they wrote a Constitution of negative law to limit the power of government and leave men free to live and work.  They also knew that citizens in a pure democracy would push for ever more government to the detriment of freedom and our republic.  At the planning commission meeting last Thursday, many were there proving the point.

Citizens can and will protect their own interests and their own resources better than government can, and that applies to all issues including:  safety, the environment, health, maximum economic benefit, effective utilization, and preservation of all of our resources.

Citizens do this because it’s in their interest to do so.  Government is merely a third party with no stake—government is just not as motivated to protect our property as we are.

Don’t give them more power over us.  It’s a poor bargain.  You won’t get the protection you expect and they won’t ever relinquish the power they take.  You will burden us forever with more expensive, unproductive, and arbitrary bureaucracy.

This code of oil and gas regulations presumptively treats every citizen in Elbert County like a criminal.  We are not criminals, and we are not merely applicants.  We are free American citizens who can write our own contracts and protect ourselves.  And we don’t need a ruler to tell us what we can do.

Look how this oil and gas lessor protected his interest.  He wrote a one page addendum to his lease that fully protects his interests.  This is how adults solve problems responsibly.  Responsible citizens don’t run to government planners and clamor in public meetings for 60-page monstrosities of zoning law to provide environmental lawyers and planners with an endless pool of aggrieved litigants.

U.S. Supreme Court
ICC v. Brimson, 154 U.S. 447 (1897)
Interstate Commerce Commission v. Brimson
No. 883
Argued April 16, 1894
Decided May 26, 1894
154 U.S. 447

“Power given to Congress to regulate interstate commerce does not carry with it authority to destroy or impair those fundamental guarantees of personal rights that are recognized by the Constitution as inhering in the freedom of the citizen.”

“The inquiry whether a witness before the Commission is bound to answer a particular question propounded to him, or to produce books, papers, etc., in his possession and called for by that body, is one that cannot he committed to a subordinate administrative or executive tribunal for final determination. Such a body could not, under our system of government and consistently with due process of law, be invested with authority to compel obedience to its orders by a judgment of fine or imprisonment.”

“Neither branch of the legislative department, still less any merely administrative body, established by Congress, possesses or can be invested with a general power of making inquiry into the private affairs of the citizen. Kilbourn v. Thompson,

Page 154 U. S. 479

103 U. S. 168, 103 U. S. 190. We said in Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 116 U. S. 630 — and it cannot be too often repeated — that the principles that embody the essence of constitutional liberty and security forbid all invasions on the part of the government and its employees of the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of his life. As said by MR. JUSTICE FIELD in In re Pacific Railway Commission, 32 F. 241, 250, “of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value.”

Now, see: 

The American Community Survey

~

We were downtown last night, taking our son to visit with the USC Marching Band who are in town for the CU game this evening.  As it turned out we spent an hour in a small v.i.p. setting with Dr. Bartner, his wife, and a dozen or so leaders of the USC program, who gave us a presentation of the amazing history of the USC band and Dr. Bartner’s career, with the experience capped by hearing some warm up routines with a contingent of senior players brought here for the game.  All in all, a superlative experience we had not expected - we looked through a window into a truly amazing world that any kid would give his eye teeth to join.

So, it was a rare occasion for us downtown and coincidently the occupation is the subject of probably half of the broadcast TV news and talk radio shows.  Michael Moore was in town today to pump up the faithful, and we decided to cruise Broadway in front of the capitol on our way home to see what all the fuss is about.

We saw thirty or forty people huddled around each other on the sidewalk directly across the street from the capitol, and about a half a block of various sized piles of messy human belongings, and a fair amount of trash.  It looked like a refugee camp, very sad, even pathetic.  The righteous democratic outpouring we’re bombarded with by the media is rooted in a fiction, a delusion of grandeur.

The tea party had significant numbers in the streets across the country and in Washington and the media all but ignored them.  This scamming bunch of several dozen pathological malcontents is getting enough media coverage to make it look like the second coming.  Go see for yourself.  As Gertrude Stein once wrote about Oakland, “there is no there there.”

But the Greatest of These Is Freedom, The Consequences of Immigration in Europe, By Hege Storhaug

Introduction By Bruce Bawer (translator from the Norwegian edition.)

In recent decades, as Hege Storhaug notes in these pages, those of us fortunate enough to live in the Western world have enjoyed a degree of freedom unparalleled in human history. This freedom did not come easily. It is the product of centuries of struggle — a product of the Renaissance, of the Protestant Reformation, of the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, and of a long series of hard-won reforms in various countries, of which the most notable and influential were probably the American Revolution and American Declaration of Independence, which in 1776 affirmed the then remarkable notion that human beings — every last one of them — had a right to the pursuit of happiness.

Among the things that freedom frees up are human creativity and innovation. Thus freedom has brought with it a remarkable array of technological developments and cultural achievements as well as unprecedented levels of prosperity. (more…)