City Permits

What an asinine joke!

I get this tiny two page newsletter with my monthly water bill that communicates information to me from my wonderful public servants, aka the mayor and the city council. There was a particularly interesting feature in last months issue entitled "Test Your City I.Q...."

It reads as follows:

"If you’re going to be 'dressing up' your back yard with a deck, storage building, concrete patio or a swimming pool, do you need to get a City permit first? Yes, Yes, No and Yes! You can add a concrete patio without a permit, but any of the other three require a permit first. Don't start building a feature that's going to have to be removed! And it’s easy. Contact the City's One Stop Center at 25*-**** for information on how the process works."

I could not believe my eyes, but at the same time I was not the least bit surprised. I had been recently contemplating two of the four things listed there, and was not at all thinking about going before the local magistrate and begging for permission to build a deck. I was especially taken by the part about not starting to build a feature that is going to have to be removed. I can just imagine agents of the city demanding that someone remove a small backyard deck, which is visible to no one but the property owner from his back yard. Where is the outrage?

Where is the anger at this insane behavior of our local law makers all across the United States?

Private property rights are one of the key ingredients for a free society to prosper. The ability for one to buy property and do with it as he sees fit was one of the main points of the vision of our Founding Fathers in 1776. It gives people something to work for. Private property can be used to either build a store on to earn a living or to build a home on in order raise a family. The vision of our current public leaders is to give you the illusion that you actually own the property, but to control every aspect of that property you supposedly "own."

So I ask you my fellow Americans, where is the outrage? When are we going to say to our power hungry politicians that enough is enough, they have taken too many of our rights and they will not take any more! How much longer will we let this nonsense go on?