Would be that we could roll all three of them out, the judicial, which has stolen from us; the legislative, which has betrayed us; and the executive, which, by and large, has failed us when it comes to private property rights. Let’s go to the language for children, for our government can be as mean as the school bully, as dangerous as the armed robber, and as primitive as the power of fear—all well understood by any child.
First a retrospective on the 1994 tax-reform, property rights Congress:
The members of the 1994 Congress are brought down, with, yes, a few worthwhile accomplishments left behind. However, most of them had long put their promises to us out of their minds. Now the enemy is within the gates. What climbs to the top will not be cobbled together from the wreckage on the ground.
There is never enough money for the rich urban redeveloper who wants the ordinary person’s property. There is never enough honey to spread for the idle government official languishing on the hard work of others. There is never any security for the hard-working small property owner, who, in an instant, can lose what is his to covetous eminent domain.
The Democrats like big government so that they can claim credit for government caring for all of life’s human needs from cradle to grave, while opposing property rights. They are proud to spend our money. The Republicans claim to stand for small government and for private property rights. But, once in power in Congress for a while, they ended up spending our money for massive social programs. They failed on private property rights, whether the revision of the Endangered Species Act or eminent domain reform The incumbent Republicans and Democrats both bled the taxpayer so that they could use pork-barrel projects back in the home district to build their reelection base. So, with supposedly opposite philosophies, they indeed licked the platter as clean as they could. Although the Administration added good Supreme Court appointments and made efforts at regulatory reform, the federal government acquired more private land, expanded conservation easement programs, added more federal zones—especially heritage areas to implement radical preservation ideology, and so on, eating away at the American tradition of private land ownership and private property rights.
When we sashayed on the sidewalk while singing this ditty as children, I realized a certain uneasiness to be “locked up” in the center, encircled by my dancing friends, their hands interlocked. Years later I learned that, over many hundreds of years, the children’s culture handed down this rhyme, a symbolic memory of human sacrifice, specifically, the practice of sacrificing a beautiful young woman when a bridge was built. We could rededicate the rhyme to the thousands of families forced off their land and out of their homes to this very day by the National Park Service and other environmental agencies to build monuments to their power, their bureaucracy, and radical environmentalism.
Higher and higher government soars. The government seems able to take care of everything from cradle to grave. People are focused on the security lavished on them by government. They scarcely notice that they are losing control over how they spend their money, how they use their property, and how they live. Their rights have slipped away.
A favorite childhood poem of mine was “The Duel,” by Eugene Field(1). The scene opens at “half-past twelve”:
But, as fine as the dog and cat were in their innocent cotton prints, they got into a fierce family row, and:
Property owners once stood tall, with confidence of their rights. Over time, as they cowered in fear of powerful government, they lost their sense of community and dignity. They scrapped with each other. Spoiled brats, they disputed worthwhile businesses. To settle grudges, they squealed on neighbors to environmental and zoning authorities. Fighting with each other over trivia, they failed to unite in the face of the hovering enemy. Their animosity was the key to eradicating the rights that their ancestors cherished.
Scholars of mythology interpret this ancient childhood rhyme to represent the climbing of the sun and the moon in the sky each day and night, then the setting of the sun followed by the moon. Likewise, our nation rose in its thirst for freedom, accompanied by the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Government grew too big, life became easy as a result of the freedom and hard work of earlier generations, the people’s love of liberty fell, and their fundamental private property rights dropped calamitously.
Will the people rise again as a freedom-loving folk? Will our rights rise to a pinnacle like that envisioned by the Founders? The scholars of myths say that the little poem is meant to tell a story that repeats.
But leaders must arise for the people to escape this childlike garden of verses, to draw the people from their apathy, fear, and dependence on mother government, and return to adult government, to that pinnacle of justice framed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and to see our private property rights restored.
© 2006 Carol W. LaGrasse
Notes:
1) The Poems of Eugene Field, Charles Schribner’s
Sons, 1911.
2) The title of this essay is offered with apologies to Robert
Louis Stevenson, author of the classic, A Child’s
Garden of Verses.
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