Those of you who support the Coastal Commission and their counterfeit LCP have smeared many of us as “property rights extremists”. You wou1d like to believe that the concept of “property” is not absolute, and that in certain cases such rights need be abrogated for the greater good of the environment and society.
Allow me, then, to take a moment and explain why you’re wrong.
When America’s founding fathers wrote of “inalienable rights” and “self-evident truths,” it was a revolutionary embracing of the notion that a society is only as secure as its individuals. Inspired by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, America’s founders institutionalized the view that individuals were of inestimable worth, countering the once-prevalent worldview that subordinated individuals to the collective value of the state and societal castes, if not the society at large.
Private property ownership was and remains the only valid manifestation of those rights. Only the self-same rights of others are cause for their limitation. Do you not realize that in fighting for these rights we are fighting for all your rights? Do you not realize that where democracy is threatened, we are all threatened?
And you have the temerity to accuse us of extremism.
On the contrary, those of you who hold our private property rights to be of secondary importance, or worse, are embracing what can only be described as a form of fascism. It is merely the focus of your fascism that separates you from the likes of Mussolini, Franco and Hitler, but it is fascism just the same. Whether you seek to subordinate individual rights to the primacy of the state or to the primacy of the environment, the net result is the same: the deterioration of civil liberties.
Eco-fascists like the Sierra Club and Access for All (“all” presumably meaning all three of them) have made no secret of their disdain for individual private property rights and democracy. Pronouncements of impending ecological Armageddon are but a sly tactic designed to passively persuade us that we would do well to voluntarily restrict our rights in the interest of the “greater good.” Clever words, indeed, but little different from the same “end justifies the means” philosophy with which history’s most egregious atrocities have been justified.
If you subscribe to the tactics and the views embraced by the Sierra Club and the Coastal Commission, then you are a fascist. Those of us who stand opposed to you are standing up for nothing less than the principles on which this nation was founded. If that makes us extremists, then so be it. If it is extreme to believe that human beings and their freedoms are more important than anything else in the universe, then we happily plead guilty.
At least we’re not fascists.
Wade Major