Flash! Left Doesn't Understand Property Rights

I butted into a long-running argument twixt liberals and conservatives about illegal aliens (undocumented immigrants, using liberal jargon) by posting the article I wrote concerning illegals trespassing over border ranches (Property Rights? We Don't Need No Stinking Property Rights). It didn’t take long to get a liberal’s response.

This is “Medawhite’s” response:

Let’s get one thing straight; one who owns property has proprietary rights. They have the right of ownership of the land and all the things upon the land; they do not have the right to divert people that are journeying across their land to get from point A to point B from doing so: The California law that makes crossing private property to get to a body of water being the most effective example. What makes a land owner believe that they are God of their universe? What if every property owner between here and Los Angles did not allow crossing their private property to get to the ocean? We would be as the Palestinians that live four hundred yard from the ocean and never see it but can only hear it.

Property owners that play God about their ownership of land allowing only certain people to cross are not even human, and should be addressed as such.

As I expected, Liberals labor under many misconceptions, and property law is probably one among many areas of abysmal ignorance.

My reply to Medawhite:

In California you do not have a right to cross another's private property to get to a body of water.

For example, the Sea Ranch development just south of Gualala has designated parking areas adjacent to Highway 1, and marked trails to get to the ocean at certain points. Many other land owners along the coast own the beach to the average high tide mark, and do not allow access to the beach across their property.

The Stornetta Ranch on the Garcia River north of Point Arena just sold 1600 acres to be administered by the Bureau of Land Management. Until they sold the land, miles of ocean front could not be accessed by the public.

I don't know where you come up with your concept that the public can "journey" across private property. Not in California.

The land owner is not God of a Universe. They just own property rights which allow them to deny the use of their property to others. If you want to cross their land to get to the water, they may sell you an easement.

Many of the subdivisions in the Gualala area have sold deeded beach access as part of the land sales package. One half-acre lot which cannot be built upon because wells drilled on it cannot produce water was sold for $65,000 just for the value of the beach access.

As with all things, the value of land includes the passage or restriction of passage over it, regardless of your assessment of the humanity of its owners. They paid for it, and if a lot of people want to cross it, they can pay tolls to its owner if they wish.

Medawhite posted a brief reply:

I will assume all that all you say is true but would ask you how is it that fishermen and river enthusiast cannot be barred from the water while ocean people can?

I have to say one thing about Medawhite. He/she just lobs them right into the strike zone. I too made a brief reply:

None can be barred from the water - ocean or river - if they obey the relevant laws for such use. But you can be barred from crossing private property to get to the ocean or the river. While on the river, there are many places along the river where you cannot go ashore because you would be trespassing on private property.

Fishermen and river enthusiasts put their boats, etc. at publicly or privately owned docks, boat ramps, etc. (they usually pay a fee for use), and take them out where they launched them or at another facility for that purpose.

Medawhite made a less than chastened reply. He/she was wrong on the law, but the law is unfair.

Thank you for the lesson. I have been edified and will remember that the rights of humanity have been subjugated to the rights of property ownership. So it is in the beginning, so it is today. You have made my case.

This was the chance I was looking for to start slashing communism and socialism, using the platform that individual property rights are much more democratic than state controlled ones.

It's nothing new. At one time, kings and lords, pharaohs and Caesars, emperors and khans, sheiks and caliphs, and all the other forms of potentates owned everything - or took what they wanted.

Then came Secretaries of Communist Parties, and socialist governments, and in those nations the state owned all.

Now we are moving to a stage in the advancement of civilization where property ownership is more democratic.

The counter movement to that is led by people, probably yourself, who wish the state would take back some or all the property rights from selfish private citizens and share them with the deserving multitudes.

When you write:

...the rights of humanity have been subjugated to the rights of property ownership.

bear in mind that humanity includes those property owners. In the United States, you can purchase property and enjoy the rights of its ownership. Or you can create property - a song, computer software, a book, picture, design, & etc. - and receive value from its use. In many parts of the world, only the elite or rulers can have that, and all you create is theirs.

I know, I can almost hear you saying it; of course what is created belongs to the people. The man couldn't write the software without the state education. And songs, books, pictures are just entertainment - why should only one person make money from something that should be given to everyone to enjoy?

The answer is simple and obvious. Man creates to satisfy himself. He wants to decide if it is to be given away to the masses, and not let the decision be made by the masses, or by the rulers of the masses.

In fact, absent that control and choice, man will not create much of anything of value. Human nature trumps idealistic utopianism every time.

At this point another fellow posted about how arch liberal Barbra Streisand tried to prevent the California Coastal Records Project from publishing aerial photos of her mansion taken from a helicopter flying offshore. According to Babs, she not only does not allow access across her property, she doesn’t even allow it to be photographed from a helicopter flying over public land. She lost her lawsuit.

Click on this link (Coastal Record) , and then click on “About the Streisand Lawsuit” about halfway down the left column.

Because of Bab’s lawsuit, huge numbers of viewers have gazed upon the photo of her mansion that would never have it she had kept her commodious mouth shut.

I wonder if her carbon footprint is a big as Al Gore’s mansion. I’ll bet she is as extravagant a user of energy as Hypocrite Al.

It didn’t take long for a good utopian socialist like Medawhite to get to the crux of the insurmountable problem facing socialists and communists: human nature.

People don’t want to live and behave as socialists and communists theorize they should. This aspect of human nature doesn’t go down well with Medawhite.

So you are saying that utopianism be damned. I suppose this is the difference between you and me. I understand your point of view but simply disagree with the entire precept that there should be class differences. I am not naïve I know that your idea of how it should be will never cease to exist do to the condition of man in the flesh of being greedy and self emulated in narcissism of self worth.

It has been interesting for me to delve into the mind of a liberal concerning property rights. I just assumed that property rights are a defining element of personal rights and freedom, and was surprised to find such deep ignorance coupled with animosity towards individual ownership of property.

I mercifully concluded this incredibly one-sided exchange:

The ownership of property rights, and the exercise of such rights by the owner, has nothing to do with class. An impoverished person can receive property rights to an expensive estate through such means as a bequest, and exercise those rights the same as the person who paid a fortune to acquire them. The late Anna Nichole Smith comes to mind.

Ted Kennedy would just be another miserable alcoholic without the power of inherited property rights. The fact he has no class does not prevent him from the free exercise of property rights.

Or from trying to use the government to take mine and give them to his supporters.

It used to be said democracy would only last until the politicians found they could bribe the people with their own money. Actually, this should be amended to state that it will last only to the point when politicians find they can bribe the people with other people's money.

That's the real essence of class differences. The have-not class doesn't want everyone to be just as miserable as themselves. They just want politicians to give them everything that others worked hard to earn and save.

The liberal politician says, "You vote for me, and I'll see what I can take from them and give to you."

THE POWER TO TAX IS THE POWER TO DESTROY.

Medawhite seemed to have given up on the property rights thread, because his/her next post was completely off the wall:

Mr. Major Mike, may I remind you for a moment that the US is spending more money on world domination and oil at any cost than it is in Public Welfare. More money is also being given to corporations in tax breaks to the point that it is called Corporate Welfare for the corporations that were formed for the specific purpose of providing weapons of war and mass destruction to the US and Israeli Governments along with anyone else that may need a weapon or two; also the subsidies that are given to the drug companies in the form of no bid drug prices; the subsidies given to the weapons manufacturers in the form of foreign aid to Israel and the dictators in Darfore that receive tax dollars from America and its corporate arm the World Bank. How about the subsidies given to Halliburton and the others that receive no bid contracts, no bid meaning that there is no cap on the profits, being what is called a time and material contract: The more you spend the higher your profits.

What about tax dollars being spent on food subsidies to the corporate corn and wheat industries to drive down the world prices and starve the locals which cause them to migrate to America?
The big laugh that the Archer Daniels Midland types have on the American public and those that may sympathize with this paradigm is that the produce can be grown and subsidized even though it has never seen American soil having been grown in India or anywhere else on the planet. Corporations are throwing bales of American taxpayer money around like footballs literally in hundred dollar bill bales of ten thousand and you are worried about some welfare queen scenario, or some migrant that might get health care illegally?

With Medawhite throwing around the stock attacks on United States world domination and lust for oil, buzz words like Corporate Welfare, Haliburton, Archer Daniels Midland, and put downs of Israel, I realized I had pushed Medawhite to the wall, causing the unleashing of a torrent of leftist clichés.

Against such a scattergun (scatterbrain) fusillade of liberal allusions towards conservative issues, I chose to answer by firing volleys in force about reductions in military spending as a percent of gross domestic product, lower food prices through greater agricultural efficiency, and how spending on entitlement programs is dwarfing all other government activities and will soon sink our economy.

Against Medawhite’s torrent of opinions and allusions, I unleashed a torrent of facts. Please click on this link, it's much to long to copy/paste. Thanks.

I doubt it will do any good. Facts to leftists like Medawhite are of interest only to the extent they consider them malleable and capable of being shaped to fit the liberal need of the moment.

A fact means nothing, its interpretation is what counts.

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