Ace is writing on the Park Service shenanigans during the shutdown (emphasis in original):
Obama does not own the military, the government, or the national parks, media. Obama instead is the trustee of these things -- but is required to oversee them for the benefit of their true owners, the American People.
Here are some other things a trustee cannot do: [snip]
And he definitely, definitely may not block the beneficiary from enjoying the property held in his name to coerce the beneficiary to pay him more for his services as trustee, or to give more freely to charities the trustee favors.
Read the whole thing.
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11 comments:
I did read the whole thing. Seems to me he has a very good arguement for several lawsuits against the government -- especially by those particular persons who were thrown out of their private residences. He brought up the landlord lease laws which basically state that as long as the renter is in good standing with their lease/rent, the property is theirs to do with as they please (within any pre-set regulations or guidelines that are part of the rental/lease contract. Think HMO's.) until such time as they relinquish their leased property via moving or through nonpayment of their lease amounts. When the NPS agents went onto private property and ordered citizens to leave their property they violated so many laws it's not even funny. Were it me, I would sue not only the government, but I would include the president, the Senate majority leader, the NPS head and each and every NPS agent who showed up on my property.
Of course, as MH said when this was all going down, the NPS brownshirts are very lucky nobody showed up at their PRIVATE property door with a gun. Of course, had someone done so, it might have brought this whole charade to a very public end.
Oh, Hi, Elise! Thought I'd stop by and bug ya here at your own place.
heh
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Hi, DL Sly. Glad you stopped by to bug me. :+)
The whole landlord thing didn't occur to me until I read Ace. I guess that's a sign of how easy it is for me to get used to the idea that the Feds can do pretty much whatever they want rather than being bound by the same laws as the rest of us.
If I understand correctly, the Claude Moore Colonial Farm got the NPS to back off by filing suit. And according to a USA Today story about the Pisgah Inn:
Inn owner Bruce O'Connell said Wednesday the Interior Department of Interior agreed to let him reopen his lodge on the Blue Ridge Parkway in exchange for dropping a legal complaint he had filed.
That whole "in exchange" thing makes me a little queasy but I am glad they've re-opened. Call me cynical but it will be interesting to see if the owner loses his lease which I believe is up for renewal within the year.
As for the idea of someone answering the door to NPS while holding a gun, I worry about something like that happening. Everyone seems to be so very angry. I understand why but it's a dangerous situation.
In the same USA Today story, the Inn's owner talks about how much support he's received from people on all sides of the political spectrum and says:
They all have said the same thing, every one of them: Don't give up. Fight tyranny. That tells me that if someone threw a match in the middle of the country it would explode right now.
I'm afraid he's right and that's a scary thought.
The business owner's have standing for a major lawsuit given that in any lease, access to the property is also included in the agreement. So the minute the NPS agents blockaded the road and turned customers away, they were breaking the lease agreement -- each and every time. More than two times in this deliberate manner falls into RICO territory.
You're right, that is a scary thought. And I can't help but wonder if that isn't what they are hoping for.
RICO the Federal government. Freeze its assets during the case.
Now there's a spending cut.
Eric Hines
I hope the lessors' lawsuits happen - we'll see. The government holds a lot of cards that can be played to make pursuing a suit really, really tough - not just expensive but risking losing leases, being hassled, etc.
You're right, that is a scary thought. And I can't help but wonder if that isn't what they are hoping for.
I don't think so (prefer not to think so) in the sense of "let's push until someone fights back then use that as a excuse to really crack down." I do think, though, that positions have hardened. One side expects the NPS to act like jack-booted (well, Oxford-shod) thugs and is primed to fight back. The NPS (etc) expects those they shut down to make a stink and probably want to make it clear who's in charge. It has the potential to be a powder keg.
The rhetoric - terrorists, gun to head, hostage takers, economic traitors - makes it sound like a war for the soul of the country and that makes it easier for people to go too far. I thought McArdle was really good on this issue in a recent post. As she says, we see each other as movie villains. That makes it easy to take that dangerous step too far.
Perhaps - I hope - the Feds doing things like backing down on Pisgah and re-opening the Statue of Liberty indicates that cooler heads are trying to prevail.
The rhetoric - terrorists, gun to head, hostage takers, economic traitors - makes it sound like a war for the soul of the country and that makes it easier for people to go too far.
Only if you are taking the "rhetoric" at face value, without regard for whose rhetoric it is. One side has remained calm and rational in its rhetoric (if not entirely sound in its tactics) all along.
There are a few hotheads on both sides, but those are not enough to make a conflagration--especially given the fundamentally bully nature of one side: bullies are cowards.
Another aspect of this: The government holds a lot of cards that can be played...risking losing leases....
I keep wondering why anyone would want to do business with such a mendacious government. What if businesses, en masse, decided not to do business with this government--chose not to sell, not to renew leases, not to...? But that's just an idealist's pipe dream.
Eric Hines
Bullies are cowards except when they run in groups or think they can get away with their bullying, might even be supported in the bullying.
As far as I know, the kind of thing the NPS is doing now - shutting down and evicting people leasing government land - hasn't happened previously. So this is all new to those who are doing this kind of business with the government. Plus if you have money sunk into your home or business that you couldn't get out, it's difficult to just walk away. And there are some businesses - for example, some defense contractors - whose whole business would disappear if they didn't sell to the government.
Worse, since the Feds are the only game in town for people who live and work on government land and for people whose whole business is selling to them, there isn't even a mechanism to force the Feds to pay a penalty to hold onto their renters and their suppliers.
Of course it isn't easy, no one said otherwise. Two things, though: if you don't have any principles worth fighting for, you don't have any principles. And, if too few are willing to stand with you in the fight for those principles through the passive resistance of en masse withholding of services because too many have been successfully bullied, then other pathways are called for, including, perhaps, sterner measures of resisting a mendacious and bullying government.
[S]ince the Feds are the only game in town for people...whose whole business is selling to them....
As someone who's walked away from three long-term jobs, including a career in Federal service, over principle, I'm simply not sympathetic to this...excuse.
Eric Hines
then other pathways are called for, including, perhaps, sterner measures of resisting a mendacious and bullying government.
And that worries me if we're talking about something other than either unrelenting effort to elect the kind of government we think we should have, or some kind of peaceful split of the country.
As someone who's walked away from three long-term jobs, including a career in Federal service, over principle, I'm simply not sympathetic to this...excuse.
Good for you - and I mean that in all sincerity. But if one is a business owner who employes 250 people and knows that walking away means they all lose their jobs; and they and their families lose their health insurance and end up on Medicaid; and we're in the middle or rece/depression and it's extremely unlikely most of those employees will find other jobs, then we're not talking about excuses. We're talking about balancing one principle ([this] government is bad and someone needs to stand up to it) with another principle (I'm not going to abandon employees who rely on me for a paycheck).
Similarly, if one if the sole support of a disabled spouse, chronically ill child, elderly parents, one is not making an excuse. One is balancing that first principle against a second principle that involves taking care of ones family.
If the business is on the path to bankruptcy, which it is in a centrally managed economy that's in debt for many future generations with a devastatingly vast amount of money being printed that will drive inflation to generationally destructive levels, its owners are doing no harm by standing on a principle. Further, those 250 employees and their employer do, indeed, depend on each other, but the business is only one tool for satisfying that mutual dependency.
As for being the sole support for a family member, the resources remaining from walking away from a job are not different from the "resources" remaining from an inflation that demands wheelbarrows of money to buy a loaf of bread. If there's one on the shelf to be bought.
We're not that far away from a Weimar Republic-scale failure.
And none of this even begins to approach the individual liberty and responsibility, or the individual moral, failures that are looming.
Eric Hines
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