From: ladasky@netcom.com (John J. Ladasky II)
Subject: Re: Greens vs. Property Rights
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 1992 01:29:51 GMT

In article <1hs8brEINNfle@uni-erlangen.de>,
arras@forwiss.uni-erlangen.de (Mike Arras) writes:
>
>	I hear from Rush Limbaugh (the right) and All Things Considered
>(far left) that many environmentalists are anti-property rights.  Would
>anyone care to guess at what percetage of "greens" are against property
>rights?  Is it in the party line?
>
>Mike Arras
>arras@forwiss.uni-erlangen.de

	I'm with the Green Party of California.  The San Francisco Bay Area
has a publication called the Green Consensus.  Sometime earlier this year,
a Green had an editorial published in the paper that explicitly called for
a re-evaluation of the concept of property rights.  There were no heated
follow-ups to this article in subsequent issues.  Either this means that 
most Greens agreed with the statement and found it non-controversial, or 
that nobody found the issue particularly exciting or important.

	Speaking for myself,  I think that "property rights" is not a 
single issue.  It is a multi-faceted issue.  You would have to be a total
extremist to be completely in favor of, or completely against, everything
grouped under the heading of property rights.  To take two small examples,
there is the right to purchase land, and then there is the right to cut
down all the trees on that land, pollute it, build condos on it, etc.
There was a famous case recently in South Carolina in which a developer
purchased about $1 million of waterfront property, only to have his plan
to build houses on the property rejected by the government.  I don't 
remember the exact details, but some endangered species would have been
devastated by the construction.  I think that the government's action 
was appropriate, even though it restricted the property rights of the
developer.  (However, I think that the developer was also entitled to 
know what he could and could not legally do with the property before he
purchased it.  We'll probably need to add an environmental report to 
property transactions in the U.S. - something like a termite inspection 
on a house that's about to change hands.)

	Now, for the other side of the coin: organizations like The Nature
Conservancy purchase tracts of Brazilian rainforest, and withold it from the
loggers and cattle ranchers.  As a Green, I applaud this use of the right to
own property.

	There is no blanket anti-property-rights statement in the platform
of the Green Party of California.  How about it, fellow Greens?  What do
you think?


-- 
== John J. Ladasky II ("ii") ========================= ladasky@netcom.COM ==
"Great composers do not borrow -	     "Talking about music is like
 they steal."  - John Ladasky	      ~ -     dancing about architecture."
(quote stolen from Stravinsky, who    o o     - Elvis Costello?  Laurie
 stole it from a statement made by     >        Anderson?  Frank Zappa?
 Pablo Picasso about painting, who    \_/    -------------------------------
 stole it from...)			     "Property is theft." - Groucho
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