Texas Annexed by Krautistan

The Texas state government seems to have settled on the dirty trick they want to use to deprive innocent people of the ruins of their properties.

Hundreds of people whose beachfront homes were wrecked by Hurricane Ike may be barred from rebuilding under a little-noticed Texas law. And even those whose houses were spared could end up seeing them condemned by the state.

…

Worse, if these homeowners do lose their beachfront property, they may get nothing in compensation from the state.

The reason: a 1959 law known as the Texas Open Beaches Act. Under the law, the strip of beach between the average high-tide line and the average low-tide line is considered public property, and it is illegal to build anything there.

Over the years, the state has repeatedly invoked the law to seize houses in cases where a storm eroded a beach so badly that a home was suddenly sitting on public property. The aftermath of Ike could see the biggest such use of the law in Texas history.

So the government can steal your land just because it happens to be under water now.

The former state senator who wrote the law had little sympathy.

"We're talking about damn fools that have built houses on the edge of the sea for as long as man could remember and against every advice anyone has given," A.R. "Babe" Schwartz said.

At least now we know what he thinks of his peons.

"And whether you like it or not, neither the Constitution of the United States nor the state of Texas nor any law permits you to have a structure on state-owned property that's subject to the flow of the tide."

What is the saying? "In America everything is permitted except for what is prohibited by law. In Germany everything is prohibited except for what is permitted by law."

Isn't that patently un-American? What's become of "a government of limited and enumerated powers"? Looks like it took only two hundred years to turn into a dictatorship where people have only limited and enumerated rights.

This is exactly what those Founding Fathers who opposed a Bill of Rights feared: That some future government running amok would turn it into a finite list of the few rights the government has granted to the people.

Of course, no constitution can ever be a final arbiter. Even if a constitution did grant a government the power to pass a fundamentally unfair and cruel law, that wouldn't make that law right. It would only make that constitution wrong.

And what if some flood deposits sediment on a public beach? Do local landowners get to keep the land so created?

No? The law doesn't cut both ways?

As always: rulers and peons, rulers and peons.