NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — Iwent to the League of Women Voters forum on the streamside ordinance scheduled to be taken up by the Fayetteville City Council in February. This is a very immoral law that could only arise in a degraded and declining society that has lost the natural healthy sense of right and wrong and has accepted the rule of force with no regard to whether or not there is any righteousness and integrity behind it.
A healthy society respects the principle that bearing the burdens of property ownership should also confer rights to freely decide the use of that property, so long as one’s use is not harming others. People work very hard and sacrifice a great deal to make the money to buy property and pay the taxes, and put in a great deal of work to maintain it and develop it in a way that benefits the community, and bearing these burdens ought to confer somerights to decide its use. This was recognized in earlier times in America when people had more natural healthy sense of morality, and protection of property rights was a strong feature of the laws.
And because the laws then were more moral, America rapidly rose to become the foremost country in the world, the leader in invention, creativity and human rights.
This streamside ordinance is based on the premise that the property owner bears all the burdens, but the government has all the rights and privileges to decide the use of that property.
This is wrong and immoral.
It’s true that this ordinance still leaves the property owner with some rights, but the principle is wrong and of course this is meant as a stepping stone to ordinances which will diminish property rights further.
If there is a specific form of water pollution that is a real problem, it is fine and goodto pass laws against causing that form of pollution, but this law is a vastly over-reaching usurpation on the pretext of possibly preventing some minor amount of water pollution. That it’s not seriously meant to stop pollution, but to destroy property rights, is shown by the fact that it allows pesticides and herbicides near streams, but not pets, thus regarding nature’s animals as harmful while deadly synthetic chemicals are just fine.
As we can clearly see, America has declined greatly in recent years, with our economy in shambles and our prestige in the world rapidly going down, and it’s because our leaders have embraced the contempt for the people philosophy underlying this ordinance and the people have gone along with far too little objection.
JOE ALEXANDER
Fayetteville
Opinion, Pages 5 on 02/26/2011