What could be more of a yawn than another story that government wants to take away property rights? The big hub-bub in Asheville these days is a bunch of people who worked hard to save up their money to buy land now finds government wanting to prohibit them from doing anything on it.
You see, building disturbs the soil, and when it rains, mud goes into the streams. The world didn’t have any mud in its streams until the evil military-industrial complex came on the scene with its cut-throat capitalism. Prehistoric imprint fossils are fraudulent, as Big Oil and its ilk have, with blind ambition, wrought all the ills on this earth.
If a conservative had this kind of reaction to mud, they would be labeled an irrational “mud-phobe.” However, environmentalists trained by expert scientists like Al Gore and Michael Moore, are now attempting to isolate politics from science and protect the world from mud by prohibiting building within 50′ of any city stream or river. Some of the more enlightened activists wanted to increase the buffer to 100′.
At the time of this writing, it is unclear why property owners are upset at not being able to use their property, not being compensated by government for losing the right to use their investment, and having to pay taxes on the affected parcels nonetheless. It is estimated that only about 8.8% of the city’s land will be affected by the new ordinance.
The Progressive city council will vote tomorrow on whether these greedy property-rights barbarians can use the property they bought or whether we can celebrate our vibrant diversity as a team, working for tomorrow, with buffers, pages of rules for buffers, and more government officials to enforce the rules.
Short of using taxpayer dollars to sue government, what can be done?
