There Is A Point Where People Go Too Far With “Rights” … Is This One Of Them?

J.J. Jackson* | December 7, 2005

WPTV Channel 5 reported yesterday on Hattie Siegel who has a problem. WorldNetDaily also has a story on this today. Her problem is that she “stands to lose everything in a dispute with local officials because she believed it was her constitutional right to keep her yard the way she wanted it”.

Ok, hey I love that idea. And people know that I have railed against the little Marxists running home owners associations and local municipalities who tell residents they can’t put up a fence or have a pink flamingo in their yard or even fly the American Flag.

The libertarian in me loves private property rights. However that said, there DOES get to a point where even that libertarian in me says that you cannot hurt someone else’s property doing whatever you want with your own.

Apparently Ms. Siegel thought that her rights also held true “? even if that meant refusing to trim back overgrown vegetation.”

Ok, some “overgrown” vegetation no problem. Lots of people own acres and acres and acres of farm land that they don’t cut all the time. The complaint however is that her yard “over time it had become so overgrown with vegetation it had become an eyesore and a harbor for rats and snakes.”

The local government even at one point took “out seven dump trunks of vegetation.” That is a lot for a residential yard to hold!

I would really like to see a picture of this property and I have tried to find one. I would really like to see what her property really looked like.

That said as mentioned earlier sure you have the right to keep your property the way you like to a point. And the Libertarian in me (which says yes you have rights but so do other people as well) says that point is that you cannot cause harm to someone else’s property rights by dong so. Which is why I support zoning ordinances and other such laws that prohibit someone from moving in next door, tearing down the house and putting up a full service garage!

Ms. Siegel said that she was “too tired” to deal with the dispute and had assets close to $1 million having owned several other properties as well. So why didn’t Ms. Siegel just sell one of the homes, bank the money and pay a neighborhood kid $20 bucks every couple weeks to keep her yard clean?

One half of liberty is “rights” but the other half is “responsibility”.

That said, I would STILL like to see a picture of her yard and see if it rises to the occasion of someone obstinate and not upholding the second half of that covenant or if it was some local official just looking to make a land grab.

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