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Published on 03/08/1999 All articles from this issue

Property rights go up in smoke

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By Gene Sinclair

Other Voices

As I suspected, even before the ink is dry on the greatest shareholder fleecing in history, the next victim is already under attack. At this rate, all human vices (and coincidentally, all shareholder equity) will be eliminated by the time you try to cash in your 401 (k) retirement.

But, hey, it's OK. We're doing it for the kids. (Enriching unscrupulous trial lawyers and politicians makes a lousy cover story for the great transfer of your wealth just under way.)

I am referring, of course, to last year's $206 billion "settlement" between "Big Tobacco" and various states' attorney generals and the announced New Orleans and Chicago multi-million dollar lawsuits against gun manufacturers and distributors.

"Big Tobacco" had it coming, you say. Don't you know smoking is bad. Everyone knows guns are dangerous and unnecessary. Besides, the settlement money will be spent on education and health care.

Now, I've never smoked and am glad that smoking is banned in public places in California. Governments are supposed to protect us from one another, not from ourselves.

I do own a gun, but only after facing down a former neighbor's drug-crazed, gun-toting teen-aged stepkid for 20 minutes before the police arrived to arrest him. (Relax, it didn't happen in Los Altos.)

But you don't have to have Lucky Strikes up your sleeve or be an NRA member to be a loser here.

We are all losers when private property is taken by governments without due process or appropriate compensation.

The tobacco companies "settled" only when it was made clear to them that constitutional protection of private property was going to be suspended in their case. The gun manufacturers and retailers know where they stand.

Private property is the foundation on which all political freedom and prosperity rest. Every assault upon our collective property is an assault upon our personal freedom and wealth.

The tobacco settlement and the suit against the gun manufacturers is an assault upon the private property of consumers, shareholders and convenience stores and gun shops, big and small.

In an all too real sense, it is an assault upon everyone's freedom and prosperity.

Stay tuned to your local paper for a hint of who the next victims will be. Judging from some of the recent "ground-softening" commentary there, I'd say liquor distillers and distributors are good candidates. New trial balloons go up almost daily about the high cost of prescription drugs. Then there are those gnarly Ginzu knives. (Nobody ever dials that 800 number, anyway.)

The huge productivity gains of the Roaring Twenties masked increasing government intervention in the United States economy that eventually led to Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression.

Had the country heeded Associate Supreme Court Justice L. Brandeis' 1926 warning that, "The greatest danger to liberty lurks in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding," much of the subsequent worldwide human suffering, property loss and reduction in personal freedoms could have been avoided.

Gene Sinclair is a Los Altos resident.