Just How Are You 'Gonna' Unravel This Banana Republic?

By Ron Ewart
July 2, 2014
NewsWithViews.com

Just about every day we get an e-mail or a phone call from some property owner who is at his or her wits end over falling afoul of some rule, regulation, law, or ordinance. They have exhausted their administrative and legal remedies, sold many of their possessions to fund the fight, or borrowed heavily against their assets and they are out of cash, out of energy and out of hope. In many cases, they face the loss of their property as well and left penniless on the street. Why? Too many laws!

Or they look out their window and see a bunch of government agents trespassing all over their land ….. without permission. Or they receive a notice in the mail that they have violated some ordinance and if they don’t fix the violation immediately they could face fines ranging as high as $75,000 per day. Don’t laugh! The EPA just fined a Wyoming landowner for violating the Clean Water Act and assessed that penalty in spite of the fact a penalty this high violates the 8th Amendment against excessive fines. The landowner had all the necessary permits to do what he was doing but the EPA wasn’t buying it.

Just the other day we received a call, first from a sheriff in a rural county of Washington State inquiring about the legality of our No Trespassing signsbecause his deputy tried to serve a summons on a property owner who had installed one of our signs on his land and wouldn’t let the sheriff on the property. We talked to the sheriff for about 15 minutes about property rights and trespass law. The sheriff was all for property rights and was very sympathetic for the property owner. But the sheriff had a duty to perform that was authorized by the court and he had to fulfill that duty.

Several minutes after talking to the sheriff we got a call from the distressed property owner and his story was heart wrenching. He had reached the end of his rope and wasn’t about to take any more guff from the government. It seems he purchased property on the Columbia River back in the 90’s and had performed some improvements on the land. He had asked the county if he needed a permit and they told him no. Unfortunately, the property owner didn’t get it in writing. Next he went to a public hearing on proposed changes to the Shorelines Management Act and there, the speaker told the audience that it would not affect current property owners, as they would be grandfathered. Shortly after the public hearing the owner was served with a notice that he was in violation of the very ordinances he was told would not affect his property. He appealed the decision to the hearing examiner and was denied. He went to superior court where he lost. He went to the court of appeals and lost again. Grandfathering meant nothing and the county was out to make an example of him. The landowners spent all of their money, borrowed more and were broke. The man’s wife had a nervous breakdown. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon occurrence when coming up against an intransigent government agency. This property owner became a victim of too many laws, rules, regulations and ordinances, as are millions upon millions of Americans today. He was also the victim of government arrogance and abuse for which there is little defense under our current system.

For over 230 years American law and rule makers have layered law on top of law, rule on top of rule, regulation on top of regulation and ordinance on top of ordinance. These laws, rules, regulations and ordinances, local, state, and federal, amount to millions of individual laws. Each law comes with its own brand of enforcement for violations, including serious fines and jail time. The net result of all these laws is, every American is a lawbreaker in one form of another and they don’t even know it. But if they are caught in an innocent violation of one or more of these laws or rules, ignorance of the law is not a defense and they pay the price.

Now, to add insult to injury, the government ignores the laws they write, but levies huge fines and penalties on those who violate the very laws government ignores. And what’s even worse than that, the laws are so complex and contradictory they are fertile fields for low-life lawyers to line their pockets with millions of taxpayer dollars from lawsuits against the government for not complying with their own laws. The environmental lawyers are the worst of the bunch.

So what has happened is a once-free country, governed by the rule of law and not of men, has become a country with so many laws that government uses those laws against the people to enslave them. Individual liberty has become meaningless. Free choice is the dream of the about to go insane.

What is driving all these laws? Two things are the culprits. 1) Lawmakers have to make laws. That is what they see as their duty and they aren’t happy unless they are making laws. 2) An anti-American social justice and radical environmental agenda, created mostly by the socialists in the United Nations, but championed to the point of obsession by the American left, are driving most new laws.

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