Trouble in Michigan

[OzzyKP]

Interesting to see Rick Stanley in the article though. I know a bit of backstory on him.

He was a Libertarian Party Senate candidate in Colorado back in 2002. But he kept doing stupid things like bradishing guns at political rallies so I think the LP kicked him out of the party.

Not mainstream enough for the Libertarians. Makes a guy think.

[Odin]

@ Lincoln.

You sound like a hillbilly redneck yourself. Property rights are granted by the government, and they can take it away if it violates the rules of society (a.k.a. zoning laws). Ditto to DF, the libertarians need to get into the real world.

[Harry Seldon]

Zoning rights are different than the agreements that are negotiated buying property. Most subdivisions have agreements so when you purchase land you build within a certain timeframe or don't drag a mobile home onto your lot in a ritzy neighborhood. Without that agreement you'd be able to put the mobile home on the land, or build a house for that matter, because the subdivision is zoned residential. Being zoned residential would keep Joe Homeowner from setting up his toxic waste enterprise because he hasn't been zoned a business or industrial. All I'm saying is that it doesn't seem fair to zone him residential then to start dictating what residential means in his situation.

In Alabama you own the top of the land you live on but US Steel owns all mineral rights to most of the land around here. So if you struck oil in your backyard, US Steel would be rich.

[David Floyd]

And if your only remedy is after the fact, and I have the resources to outlawyer you, and I deny that there's any leakage (instead you're trying to undercut my business by having people dump on your land, but you don't know what you're doing ), and on and on, you end up like those folks in Woburn getting aerosolized carcinogens into their lungs every time they take a shower.

Then the problem is one of you hijacking the legal system, and judicial corruption, which I'll grant you is a problem, but an irrelevant one to this discussion.

It wouldn't have to be millions, like I said, and this sort of thing has been done all the time. 30 years ago, much of the Temecula valley was abandoned or semi-abandoned ranches. Now a lot of it is yuppie housing. Land development is generally a very long term investment. And pesky holdouts in the middle of the developers property can really screw up future plans.

And I just don't see how these people's rights are being violated. Sorry.

Since you keep talking about rights that exist independent of government recognition, I was talking about the Indians who were murdered and forcibly driven off their lands. After all, if you have "natural rights" it doesn't seem natural that they'd only be available to white people.

Oh, you're certainly correct. But the question also becomes "Who did the Indians displace?"

In any case, just because there have been rights violations in the past doesn't mean that rights violations NOW are justified.

Not at all - my point is that the "ownership" doesn't exist outside the legal framework for ownership.

So concepts of "ownership" and "private property" don't predate government? That is, if I build a house on property I live on, and no one else does, or ever has, then I need a government to come along and tell me that it's mine?