Beware the pennies on your eyes

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 May 2001 10:03:04 GMT

FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED OCT. 30, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Beware the pennies on your eyes

Back in 1997, the state Legislature authorized the Southern Nevada Water Authority to start assessing well owners in the Las Vegas valley a $30 annual fee to partially fund a groundwater management program. (The fee is supposed to help fund efforts to recharge the valley's long-overdrawn desert aquifer.)

In order to assess the fee, the water authority used state well records as well as field inspections of area homes to compile a list of 10,000 remaining private well owners.

Now, the private Nevada Well Owners Association is trying to contact those well owners, in order to organize them against what Association Vice President Robert Tretiak contends is a government plan to pressure the well owners into giving up their wells and hooking up with the municipal water system.

The water authority has refused to provide the owners association with the list. The authority says it mailed out post cards, asking well owners to give their permission if they wanted their names released to the private association, but that only about 10 percent have responded in the affirmative. Mr. Tretiak responds that the postcard failed to adequately describe the association's advocacy role, and that the list is a public record, anyway, subject to open records laws. That's why the association has now filed suit to force release of the list, Mr. Tretiak explains.

"We're going to defend their privacy," vows water authority spokesman Jesse. Davis.

Too late.

The initial problem was that $30 fee, of course. Are they planning to charge 30 bucks to anyone who sinks a hole for a fencepost down near the Las Vegas Wash and and strikes mud? How about kids digging in the back yard? If these clowns can now tax private wells in the desert, how long will it be before they start charging a "breathing tax" to fund government efforts to supposedly clean up the valley's air? This is dangerous nonsense.

Besides, it's the municipal water systems which have done most of the drawing down of the valley's water table over the decades -- if anything, the government should be paying private well owners for the degradation of their water rights, not the other way around.

At any rate, the authority's insistence on now violating open records laws in order to keep their assessment list secret does indeed lend credence to suspicions that the fee -- isn't it interesting how they always start out so small and unobtrusive? -- was indeed a guise for gathering information which the authority doesn't want anyone else to have. Can it be long now before the authority claims to have "jurisdiction" over these wells, finally insisting it actually "owns" them?

(Just ask the Clark County cattle ranchers who agreed back in the 1930s and '40s to pay a small "fee" to the Bureau of Land Management to settle up some property line disputes and help finance a few water tanks, never dreaming that 60 years later the BLM would claim to "own" those lands, eventually putting the ranchers -- all but diehard Cliven Bundy out on the Mesquite allotment -- out of business, by cancelling what gradually came to be referred to as the ranchers' "leases.")

"Privacy" is preserved when the citizens are kept safe from having government snoops gather information on them. If the authority had ever really held well-owners' "privacy" rights in high regard, it would have refused to send out those "field agents" to sneak around counting wells in the first place.

People who pay any other kind of property tax have their names -- and the assessed valuations of their property -- listed where the public can find them. True "privacy" would indeed be preferable, and I look forward to the elimination of all local property taxes -- including this absurd new tax on wells -- as soon as privacy champions like Mr. Davis and company find the time.

Till then, the list of those taxed is clearly a public document, covered by Nevada's open records laws, and the water authority should stop frittering away ratepayers' funds on a doomed legal holding action to keep this assessment list secret for a few more weeks.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and editor of Financial Privacy Report (subscribe by calling Ned at 612-895-8757.) His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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Quotes

Government doesn't work. Never did. Never will. Can't. But there are lots of good people. Love them.

-- Bill St. Clair

The Atlanta Declaration

Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

-- L. Neil Smith

Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason, then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

-- L. Neil Smith

A Penalty Clause for the Bill of Rights

Any official, appointed or elected, at any level of government, who attempts, through legislative act or other means, to nullify, evade, or avoid the provisions of the first ten amendments to this Constitution, or of the Thirteenth Amendment, shall be summarily removed from office, and, upon conviction, deprived of all pay and benefits including pension, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

-- L. Neil Smith

Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

-- John Lott, commenting on the National Academy of Sciences report on gun control laws.

Who is a libertarian?

Zero Aggression Principle ("Zap")

"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."

-- L. Neil Smith

(Formerly called the "Non-Aggression Principle", or "NAP")

Why Did It Have to be... Guns?

Make no mistake: all politicians -- even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership -- hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician -- or political philosophy -- can be put.

If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.

If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.

What his attitude -- toward your ownership and use of weapons -- conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn't trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?

-- L. Neil Smith

Concise

"Tell me," I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

-- Mike Vanderboegh

Also from The Atlanta Declaration:

... like going to the bathroom, breathing, eating, sleeping, or making love, it turns out that self-defense is a bodily function one cannot safely or effectively delegate to a second party.

-- L. Neil Smith

This does not mean that "Marijuana should be available by prescription." It means that morphine sulfate should be available in five pound bags at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, like sugar... but probably in a different aisle, to avoid confusion.

-- Vin Suprynowicz

If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

-- Edward Abbey

The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war.

-- Bill St. Clair