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May 2014
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George Rebane

Friend and Nevada County cartoonist extraordinaire RL ‘Bob’ Crabb nailed it in yesterday’s (3may14) Union with this offering (pilfered below) on the plan for the government to next confiscate our ground water, and either prohibit its consumption or charge us for it.

Crabb140504

I hope that all RR readers have been aware of these sub-rosa ‘takings’ that have been going on for some time now.  And I hope that all will understand where this will end up when the socialists finally achieve their Agenda21 objectives and declare their true colors – i.e. when the state will constructively own EVERYTHING.  (We all remember that you own something only to the extent that you can dispose of it as you will.)

The governments of America have been constructively appropriating private property for at least two generations now.  They still let us keep pieces of paper that state our ‘ownership’ of things, but that is a ruse.  All those pieces of paper let you do is to transfer possession and maintenance to another nebbish, and in the interval you are responsible for paying all government fees and legal liabilities that the property entails and may become involved in.

These myriad fees and judgments are drained from us with the argument that they pay for marginal services that the government provides or allows someone else to provide in our behalf.  Upon examination, the overwhelming number of these marginal payments are nothing but payola and protection money.  Protection from what? you may ask – protection from not being jailed or worse if you don’t pay or resist confiscation.

The next question then is, Well, for what do we pay the ever increasing amount of taxes on April 15th?  The answer to that is becoming more clear with every passing year – on the federal level, we are overwhelmingly taxed for wealth redistribution and debt service; on the state and local levels for reimbursing unfunded liabilities (e.g. public service pensions) incurred in our name, without our knowledge, and against our wishes.  Everything else on the margins will become a fee or extra charge added on to this or that purchase.  Ultimately, I predict we will marginally pay for every mile of public road we travel on, and for the air we breathe since the government will argue that it costs them to monitor air quality and chase down the ‘polluters’.  Also, look for a global warming tax to be levied based on some indescribably hokey metric that is guaranteed to keep on increasing regardless of air quality.

Finally, the accounting for the amounts of these marginal charges will be unfathomable and beyond corruption (the successor word has yet to be invented).  In the end the concept of money will be withdrawn and we will all be consuming with government issued credits that will be allocated on the basis of an extremely elaborate rationing scheme – and no fair saving up credits, they will just disappear from your account in order to maintain a mandated level of material equality among the citizenry.

And I do understand that some of you will argue that we are already on the threshold of this brave new socially just and sustainable world.

Posted in , , ,

71 responses to “And all these things used to be ours”

  1. stevenfrisch Avatar
    stevenfrisch

    Posted by: George Rebane | 06 May 2014 at 09:40 PM
    “That you quote current code to demonstrate that I don’t own something because the government has more guns and can take it away from me is not an argument.”
    That may be the most ridiculous thing you have every said although the competition is strong.
    You possess ‘rights’ only to the extent that your rights do not infringe on the rights of others. That is the essence of private property rights; that it goes both ways. To characterize ‘your’ rights as somehow predominant over someone else’s is essentially to deny them their right, and is thus inherently contrary to the doctrine of private property rights.
    What you object to is having a society that is the arbiter of these rights….I guess you are just going to have to get over that…because if it was not government that arbitrated those rights it would be either a despot, or someone else’s guns.

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  2. fish Avatar
    fish

    What you object to is having a society that is the arbiter of these rights….I guess you are just going to have to get over that…because if it was not government that arbitrated those rights it would be either a despot, or someone else’s guns.
    Yeah….an increasingly vacuous and gullible society….led around by the nose by a compliant media desperately trying to maintain access to the political and business classes.
    What could possibly go wrong?

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  3. George Rebane Avatar

    stevenfrisch 730am – we’re definitely going into another blind alley here. You attribute to me things that I did not say, and attempting to discuss the realities of ‘rights’ and ‘ownership’ with you appears futile. In my view it is you who has an extremely theoretical, ideal, and impractical view of what is a ‘right’ that I last heard in a high school civics class. In the real world (including the US) rights are granted by governments, and their enforcement is highly irregular in time, space, and circumstances. Governments, including ours, have always bestowed and enforced differential rights on favored parties and cohorts, and continue to do so today.
    I tend to agree with Gregory that the strength of your arguments is best demonstrated in annihilating the straw men that you erect attribute to us.

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  4. stevenfrisch Avatar
    stevenfrisch

    Posted by: George Rebane | 07 May 2014 at 08:59 AM
    I always love how you avoid the meaning of or courage to take ownership your words George. When one says something ‘used to ours’ they are claiming a they once owned it or had a property right, pure and simple. You are boldly claiming that a right that was once yours is gone.
    Your title says exactly what you mean.
    My view is not theoretical, it is the exact legal definition of ownership of water rights. It is the definition that one would hear not in a high school debating class but a court of law, and that is just about as anti-theoretical and pragmatic as one can get.
    No straw man from me…you are merely a skilled propagandist who is being called on the meaning of your words who doesn’t have the ability to defend your position.
    I find it amazing that as a property rights advocate you actually don’t know much of anything about property rights…your entire view pf property rights is essentially theoretical…but you do know that if you make vague claims you can exercise peoples emotions about loosing something they thought was theirs, but never was.

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  5. stevenfrisch Avatar
    stevenfrisch

    Too early..not enough coffee..that should read:
    “I always love how you avoid the meaning of or courage to take ownership of your words, George.”

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  6. stevenfrisch Avatar
    stevenfrisch

    By the way….California water law 1850…..A21 1992.
    Case closed!

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  7. Todd Juvinall Avatar

    SteveF, always the bureaucrat. LOL!

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  8. Brad Croul Avatar
    Brad Croul

    Who gets the water when there are no regulations?
    Those with the biggest pumps and paid-off politicians (and guns, if necessary)?
    So, who gets the water once the Fed controls and regulates all of it?
    LaMalfa’s subsidized rice crop?

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  9. Gregory Avatar
    Gregory

    I have no doubt a born-again Regulator would steep themselves in the side of the law that could be exploited to give them carte blanche to intrusively control the resource, in this case ground water. RLC’s Jack and Jill being charged for their pail of water is a not-that-farfetched metaphor for what Frisch is arguing.
    I hear no limit on the regulatory power you claim for the State, Steven. Flowmeters on residential wells? That’s what I imagined the end game you are looking towards, and what the ‘toon portrays. Charging a per gallon fee first to defray the cost of the state monitoring groundwater extraction by rural residents, then to fund programs that feed various 501c3 organizations such as yours to ‘help’ rural homeowners meet the regulations?
    I have a right to use the water from my well on my property, zoned residential, so a “Nirvana Silly Water” to rival Fiji isn’t an issue; it’s drinking, washing and flushing water. I don’t have a right to waste that water, but outside of pouring it into that wormhole to another space time continuum I keep in my closet I’m not sure how much waste there would be.
    RL’s ‘toon was prescient.

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  10. stevenfrisch Avatar
    stevenfrisch

    You know what Greg, the law exists. It is. I have no more ‘control’ over it than you do, or than George does. So drop the faux outrage over my ‘motives’. I am no more or less motivated than anyone else in a free society.
    There are many limits on the regulatory powers I would want government to have, but in your prejudice and hate for me personally you cannot see that.
    You besmirching my ‘motives’ by making false claims of my desire to gain financially from my statements here is just a big fat fu*king lie. It is evidence of just how decayed your mind has become that you cannot make a rational policy case and must attack personally to gain position, but, if you actually listened to yourself, you would see that you are agreeing with me re: your right to waste water.
    Why can’t you waste water? Because there exists a set of rules called laws that defines the use of water, there very set of rules I was referencing above.
    Brad is precisely correct: no rules those with the biggest guns get the water.

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  11. George Rebane Avatar

    Re stevenfrisch 635am – Ah yes, we now see the progressives’ ever popular “Case closed!” Well not quite, but in any event, thank you for that extended and always revealing (556am) critique.
    First, what to a collectivist is ‘theory’ vs practical reality are diametrically opposite from what it is to the rest of us and what the world experiences – e.g. according to its constitution and laws the USSR was the most upstanding and moral country in the world. To believe that our legal code defines what actually goes on in our daily lives is beyond naiveté. We have the most byzantine and arbitrary legal system in the world that is generated, maintained, and operated by the world’s largest cadre of lawyers, becoming ever more complex by the day. These leeches use the revolving door of electoral politics to spend half their time in office making policy and laws that no one can interpret and in which every citizen in some way is in violation, and the other half draining the pockets of Americans when they merely perform normal daily activities, let alone seek redress from some ridiculous stricture. Nothing is clear or moves without lawyers of opposing contention being profitably involved.
    We now have a legal system that literally no one follows, starting from the country’s Chief Executive, his Dept of Justice, down through the corrupt bureaucracies that work under his direction. The same pattern is replicated in the states, with California delivering the most egregious governance to its residents. That something is written into law in no way settles anything today. Each new law is simply the start of a new round of happenstance and capricious implementation and, of course, launches the always attendant waves of litigation that are beyond the ken of us nebbishes trying to earn a living and attend to our own daily round.
    Confounding and abetting this legal morass are organizations such your own that claim to ‘facilitate’ things while at the same time promoting policies that become sand in the gears of commerce and create ever more environments that require such facilitation. Through whatever avenue the law comes down to us, it is a full employment act for lawyers and bureaucrats. You all thrive on complexities the ‘realities’ of which must be explained and adjudicated by the politically proper elites. But the end result is that that reality is what actually happens on the ground, be it Obamacare on the federal level, or AB32 here in California. The law is whatever is convenient to those who command the guns; there is no constitution or legal code that cannot be end run whenever it suits current purposes.
    Today we are polarized because half the country understands all this and is reaching its tolerance limit. The truth of that is evident in the Left’s increasing initiatives to shut down conservative voices in the public square (about which I’ll have more to say in a future post), and bolster all government agencies with armaments intended to suppress massive civil unrest from a citizenry it is frantically trying to disarm.
    Meanwhile, it falls to you and yours at the local level to spread the word that the descending chains have always bound us, and that nothing new is really happening. Finally, apropos to the topic of this post, the words in these pages – e.g. ownership – have been meticulously defined and I stand by those definitions along with their subsequent use in my commentaries and arguments.

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  12. fish Avatar
    fish

    Who gets the water when there are no regulations?
    Those with the biggest pumps and paid-off politicians (and guns, if necessary)?

    So just like now then…eh Brad?
    So, who gets the water once the Fed controls and regulates all of it?
    LaMalfa’s subsidized rice crop?

    So just like now then…eh Brad?

    Like

  13. Todd Juvinall Avatar
    Todd Juvinall

    Just Goohling along I found this link to California water
    http://www.fws.gov/cno/fisheries/docs/section1summaryofcawaterrights.pdf
    One of the pages (16) has this:
    “Water rights traditionally have been cons
    idered as rights in real property.
    San
    Bernardino v. Riverside
    (1921) 186 Cal. 7, 13;
    San Francisco v. Alameda County
    (1936) 5 Cal.2d 243, 245-247. A riparian ri
    ght is “part and parcel” of riparian
    land, and the right to the flow is real property.
    Title Ins. & Trust Co. v. Miller
    & Lux
    (1920) 183 Cal. 71, 81. Real property remedies are therefore available
    for riparian rights.
    Miller & Lux v. Enterprise Canal & Land Co.
    (1915) 169 Cal.
    415, 444. An appropriative right is also an interest in real property.
    Wright v.
    Best
    (1942) 19 Cal.2d 368, 382. Thus, appropriative rights may be, but are not
    necessarily appurtenant to the land. If they are appurtenant, the right is
    incidental to the land.
    Wright
    , pages 377-378. Percolating water rights are also
    real property rights.
    Stanislaus Water Co. v. Bachman
    (1908) 152 Cal. 716, 725.
    The right to use percolating waters is part and parcel of the land.
    Pasadena v.
    Alhambra
    (1949) 33 Cal.2d 908, 925;
    Rank v. Krug
    (S.D. Cal. 1950) 90 F.Supp. “

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  14. Gregory Avatar
    Gregory

    “Why can’t you waste water?”, our local 501c3 CEO asks knowingly…
    No one here was arguing a right to waste water, Steven. However, you seem to be arguing a right for intrusive controls to allow rent seekers to make a buck off ensuring I don’t have a leaking toilet.
    So Steven, current law… can you stretch it enough to require metered private residential wells and progressive pricing?
    Democrats running Los Angeles, when faced with needing to cut water use in an earlier drought, decided blanket cuts to everyone was fair… so families who were actually being frugal had to face unflushed toilets, and the profligate stopped overwatering their expansive lawns, stopped running a mostly empty dishwasher or maybe even fixed that leaking Olympic sized swimming pool, never bothering with the “if its yellow let it mellow” commandment or not bathing daily like some of my friends were forced to do.

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  15. stevenfrisch Avatar
    stevenfrisch

    George, did you take my last post down?

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  16. George Rebane Avatar

    stevenfrisch 1052am – No, and the spam filter is empty. Post again.

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  17. RL Crabb Avatar

    We used to think California would sink due to earthquakes, but instead we’ve been floating on borrowed time… http://capitolweekly.net/diving-groundwater-whats-left/

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  18. Gregory Avatar
    Gregory

    RL, pumping San Joaquin Valley groundwater to grow subsidized corn to create subsidized ethanol to fulfill the Federal mandates to adulterate motor fuels was never a good idea, and a far cry from monitoring residential groundwater use.
    How much should Jack and Jill pay for that bucket of water from the community well?

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  19. Gregory Avatar
    Gregory

    “So Steven, current law… can you stretch it enough to require metered private residential wells and progressive pricing?”
    Crickets.

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  20. Michael Anderson Avatar
    Michael Anderson

    Communist sympathizer Obama goes to a Wal-Mart in the Bay Area and all hell breaks loose: http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2014/05/09/dems-fume-obama-at-wal-mart-in-the-bay-area-what-were-they-thinking/

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  21. Bill Tozer Avatar
    Bill Tozer

    Mr. Anderson, nice link. Gladden to hear about Obama putting solar panels on the White House, leading by example. With the costs to the taxpayers, the panels will create enough non fossil energy to light up 23 100 watt bulbs up to 20 hours a day..Gee Golly, that takes my breath away. Mind boggling. If Obama really wanted to set a shining example on the hill, he would cut back on private Air Force jets and helicopters to ferry him or his dog to Hawaii and Bali. Or, at least cut his motorcade in half to decrease his carbon footprint.
    As far as the unions upset that Obama made an appearance at Wal-Mart and attended a fund raiser hosted by a sitting member of the Wal-Mart board, unions are useless to Obama now. He ain’t running for reelection so under the bus they go. All these things used to be the union’s. Not no more, no way, no how.

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