The Next Level – a True Rant

I’m still burning on how to explain what has happened today with the Supreme Court’s ruling that in essence rewrites the meaning of individual private property to mean that no such thing exists, that all property belongs to the state and can be arbitrarily confiscated depending on the whims of the “local” elected officials. Isn’t that what their explanation was as they ruled against the individual property owners in Kelo Vs New London?

Let me run some “what ifs” by and see if the recent decision might have a bearing on future life in these “here” United States. ( Try to imagine James Cagney in the movie Mr. Roberts; “Now you see “heeyah” Mistah!” I wonder why I thought of a tyrannical SOB the likes of him while thinking about the Supreme Court; my mind must be working overtime.) These are going to come off the top of my head, much like the hair that my kids now make fun of when they point to my emerging halo.

The most easy to come up with would have to have some land involved, so let’s skip to some other form of property, something that may be off on the horizon of possibilities.
The owner of a one year old pick up truck uses it to drive to and from the park and ride each morning. The total miles driven each way is 4 miles. The vehicle remains parked the entire day until the owner is dropped off by the local transit bus and he returns home.
The city is approached by an out of work tradesman, maybe a carpenter or a painter, who could make a good living if he only had the use of a truck. The determining factor would be that such a trade has a Fee Based Permit which the City makes money off of along with additional sales taxes and user fees. He can’t afford a nice year old truck at the local dealership and so he approaches his local city councilman and explains his need along with the fact that there is a truck just sitting around all day at the park and ride lot. How hard would it be to figure out a tax scheme that would be directed toward those who waste perfectly good vehicles, then take up space on an already crowded transit system, and make the tax burden so steep that it would be easier to sell the truck to the city at bargain basement prices in order to get out from under the imposed tax. The city could then sell the truck to waiting tradesman at a modest profit, collect a tax for having another vehicle on the already crowded roads and ….

The owner of a small hospital has no more rooms, no more beds and is making a good living by making sick people well. He isn’t making enough to retire in a style befitting his desires and so when another patient comes in for treatment a quick assessment of profit per patient analysis is made. It becomes clear that a patient who has had surgery already cannot make near as much for the hospital as one who is still waiting to have surgery and so the first patient must be released to “mend at home” a little earlier than reason would normally suggest. Oh, I forgot; this one is already being used by most of the HMO groups.

Maybe instead of a hospital the set up takes place in a hospice. There is a person who is going to die anyway, why not simply speed up the process and make room for another paying customer. Darn, that one already happened in Florida.

I keep working on a way to show that individual rights are still important to Americans, more especially, to the Supreme Court Judges who seem to have forgotten that it was individual Americans who stood up to King George when he ignored their voices. They signed the Declaration of Independence individually and became a group; but King George went after them one at a time in retaliation. I can feel my jaw tightening up and my blood pressure is on the rise too. I should let this rest for a while, watch a PBS show about the environment to calm down. I forgot, most of those are leftist propaganda shows and it will only make me more angry since I have to pay for these jerks telling me not to drive my truck because it might melt some glacier in Alaska, where they closed down a productive fishery because it was harming the local dwarf crab-snails or something; all paid for with my tax money.

I just sold a piece of property; one of the new forms to fill out had to do with all the environmental laws and rules pertaining to land use and endangered species. I had to admit, via the “I don’t know” line, whether or not my particular piece of property had any limitations of use placed on it. We had planned to put a vacation house on that land until some fool came along and offered me quite a bit more than market value for it. I let him have it and he can figure out when he wants to build on it; if they turn him down on his plans to build a cellar where some old Indian burial site, a horned toad lizard may have set up a nest or the last three southern blue wolf ticks have their last know natural environ, then it will be his problem. Funny how folks can meddle with something that’s not even their own land; keep the rightful owner from using it as seems fit or even proper.

I was listening to Roger Heathcock filling in for Rush today behind the golden EIB microphone. He told a familiar story about a “tree-hugger” who’d bought a sizeable piece of property and was in the process of climbing the tallest tree so that she could survey all of her land. As she got to the highest reaches of the tree she must have startled a nesting owl. Her rapid decent was not planned and she ended up going straight away to the hospital for treatment of her injuries. She related the event to the emergency room doctor and was told to wait in the treatment room so that splinters could be removed from her, putting it tastefully, her “private regions”.

Three hours went by and she was becoming aggravated for having been made to wait. The doctor finally made it back where upon she began to berate and belittle his professionalism. “I’ve been waiting 3 hours; what have you been doing?”

“I had to contact the US Forestry Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, PETA and the Sierra Club. I then had to fill out all those forms that are associated with those organizations and they still turned me down on my request to remove old timber from a recreational area.”

And you thought I was going to leave on a sour note, fists clenched and ready to take on that bear with the tooth ache…yes, I’m still burning inside.

I read a blog by Quincy at The News, The Universe and Everything which he titled,
"An Absolute Abomination" worth the read.