By DEXTER DUGGAN
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The guest at the inn noted that people came out on a Friday night in the Christmas season.
Some had traveled a distance. They were suffering under an oppressor, and they honored a sacred document.
They had come to observe a birth, not of a Child but of an organization.
The oppressor wasn’t Roman soldiers but the overreaching U.S. government. The document was the tattered U.S. Constitution.
The inn was a hotel in this Phoenix suburb, and the resemblance to the Christmas story was only coincidental.
About 60 people gathered here on December 5 to lay foundations at the first advisory board meeting of the American Property Rights Institute (APRI), an organization arising to respond to government assaults against the right to property, a key component of liberty.
Among those attending were residents of northern California, Idaho, Washington state, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona. Westerners seem particularly sensitive to federal encroachments on land holdings.
Part of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Bill of Rights orders that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
However, ranchers, loggers, and miners lose access to land that means their livelihoods, in addition to property owners facing a government straitjacket.
The talk here was about government versus the people. Some felt pushed too far.
Dan Martinez, an entrepreneur, pharmacist, and student of legal rule-making who came from an Arizona ranch family, told the gathering, “The remedy is always within the law, and that’s where we need to stay, because we’re an orderly society.”
However, Martinez added, “we have been eroded of these [property] rights through regulation. . . .
“We need to push back. . . . You see, with me, I’ve lost all my fear. . . . They’ve created a tremendous stress in our lives” to “take away our private property rights,” he said.
A New Mexico rancher told the gathering, “The livestock industry in the whole state of New Mexico is going to go away” if trends with legal challenges continue.
One speaker mentioned federal agencies setting themselves in opposition to individuals — including the Bureau of Land Management, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of the Interior, Internal Revenue Service, and Department of Agriculture — and asked, “How can Americans keep apprised of all these rules?”
The concept of “endangered species” is a useful tool to take land from the public, listeners were told.
Ron Ludders, a local conservative activist and co-director of the Conservative Business League, which does political and business consulting, emceed the meeting and started by citing the meadow jumping mouse.
“The government has decided it has to protect this mouse,” which lives in riparian areas, he said. Although he has nothing against the mouse, Ludders said, “This little mouse is more important than people. . . . Why does a little mouse’s rights supersede our rights?. . . I’m not in favor of them having a superior right to ranges than what people have.”
Ric Frost, raised on ranches in west Texas and New Mexico, told the gathering that he didn’t speak English until age 7, not because he was Hispanic but because he lived on the Rio Grande.
His educational degrees include a master’s in economics as well as expertise in Texas water rights and “a history of the land based on the Constitution,” Frost said.
When wildlife changes its patterns, there may well be a different reason than human activity, he said. “Now the big thing is the sage-grouse,” but damage comes from ravens stealing its eggs, not harm by industry.
Due to government mismanagement, Ludders said, the upper layers of forests, their canopies, have grown so thick that rainfall can’t reach the ground, depriving endangered species of the moisture and encouraging forest fires because of dryness at ground level.
Stands of trees grew so thick, Frost said, that spotted owls couldn’t fly through the forests seeking prey, but environmental activists wondered why the owls left the territory.
The logging industry was shut down by activists using the spotted owl, when activists would say, “We need to do a five-year study” of impacts on the owl, Frost said. Loggers moved away because they couldn’t wait five years to get their jobs back, he said.
The Environmental Protection Agency was created by President Richard Nixon in 1970, Frost said, and is “an agency of the executive branch of government. . . . Congress has no oversight over the EPA,” which operates outside Congress to “usurp the property rights of the individual.”
Ludders said the American Property Rights Institute hopes to get involved in situations before they go as far as becoming court cases, “before it gets into litigation.”
He added later, “We don’t want to litigate everything….We want to stop it, nip it in the bud” before it goes into court.
If the word gets around that the institute is being effective, Ludders said, then the other side won’t be so ready to raise a legal issue.
“Hopefully, we will put ourselves out of business in a few years,” he said.
Free-market advocate Kathy McDonald, of Vancouver, Wash., the finance chair of APRI, said she wants to see “an organization where we don’t have to go to court . . . to stop some of these things,” an organization to “stop the federal government in its overreach.”
She said people willing to gather on a Christmas-season Friday night for the meeting show that “you have a passion” for the issue.
An APRI flier crowned with a photo of Arizona’s snow-covered Four Peaks mountain range says the group “will support property-rights research, litigation, and programs designed to help all Americans understand the importance of individual rights and their role in keeping America blessed with liberty.”
The flier lists examples of government overreach including: “Restricting or eliminating our access to our federal and state lands; confiscation of property and restriction of private-property rights; restriction and elimination of grazing rights on state and federal land; the destruction of functioning dams.”
Also, “Limiting economic growth by restricting and regulating needed resources; EPA overreach on endangered species with removal of millions of acres from business, farming or ranching pursuits; 58 million acres of Western timberland removed from logging for use of walking trails; 77 oil and gas leases halted in Utah; the confiscation of legitimate personal and business property taken for another entity that is more desirable for higher tax benefits.”
The website is http://americanpr.us; email nmarlowCBL@gmail.com; phone 480-707-9043.
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