Financially struggling woman jailed over unpaid fine for junky yard

By David McElroy · January 13, 2012

If people can tell you what to do with your own property, do you really own it? Or do you just get to use your property as long as you do things with it that the majority like? A financially struggling South Carolina woman found out that her neighbors’ complaints about her yard can send her to jail.

Linda Ruggles is a photographer who lives in a suburb of Charleston, S.C., and her photography business has fallen on hard times recently. She lost her photo studio to foreclosure and she almost lost her home to foreclosure last year. She now works part-time as a cashier at a grocery store, and she sold her blood, collected scrap metal and volunteered for medical experiments to come up with the money to barely keep her home.

The roof of her house leaks, so she was able to buy some roofing tiles, but she hasn’t yet been able to come up with the money to pay roofers to install them, so they’ve been sitting on her roof waiting to be put on for three years. Her yard has some junk, including some columns that need to be installed on her porch.

Her neighbors aren’t happy. After they complained to the local municipal government, she was issued a fine for $480 — which she can’t afford to pay. “I told everyone, ‘If I had $480 to pay the fine, I’d fix the roof,'” she told the Charleston Post and Courier.

The city says it’s an open-and-shut case. She was issued a fine. A judge said she was guilty. She didn’t pay the fine or show up in court. So they threw her into jail for six days.

So who’s right? And who’s to blame? I’d say everyone is right and the system is to blame.

It wasn’t until the early 20th century that the idea of zoning was introduced in the United States. Before that time, you could do whatever you wanted with your property, unless there were deed covenants that restricted how you used the property. A deed covenant is simply a private agreement that comes with a piece of property that says you agree to certain rules about the property before you buy it. If you don’t like the restrictions, you don’t buy the property.

But as a part of the progressive movement, cities decided that they had the power to tell owners what they could do with their property and what rules they had to abide by. (I wrote Thursday about the moral error at the root of the progressives’ ideas.) The rules were determined by the representatives of the majority, of course, so individual property owners had no say in what they were forced to do or not do. These rules have gotten more and more restrictive over the years.

The city where Ruggles lives — like most cities today — has certain rules about property. The city can change the rules whenever it wishes. The only thing that matters is what the representatives of the majority want. If the majority rule that everyone must paint his house purple, that’s what you have to do. If the majority demand that everyone keep lawns kept a certain way and trimmed to certain heights, that’s what you have to do. Your property isn’t really your own.

If I were Ruggles’ neighbors, I wouldn’t be thrilled with what her property looks like, either, but they have no contract with her, so they should have no say in the matter. The idea that the majority should be able to unilaterally dictate to her what she can do with her property is repugnant, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled — in a 1926 decision during the progressive era — that a property owner has no rights against the majority on the matter.

I understand Ruggles’ problem and her struggles. She seems like someone who is up to her neck in problems and has struggled mightily to escape trouble. She’s stayed just barely ahead of financial disaster for the past few years. And now the city punishes her because she’s unable to keep her home as the majority of her neighbors want.

I also understand how the neighbors feel. Because of expectations of zoning, deed covenants aren’t used that much anymore to create the kinds of mutual obligations they once created. These private agreements have been usurped by governments — claiming the right to decide for everyone.

If everyone in a neighborhood wants restrictions about how property has to be kept, I don’t have any problem with that, because it’s voluntary. But I have a serious problem with politicians and bureaucrats operating in the name of the majority to make up rules for everyone else. It’s wrong.

The idea that Ruggles should spend a week in jail because she can’t afford to fix her property and creates more of a mess than the neighbors like is an evil idea. It’s another manifestation of the idea that individuals don’t matter. Only the will of the majority matters.

In a country that was supposed to be founded on principles of individual liberty, it’s a tragedy. It shows how little “the land of the free” really cares about property rights or the rights of individuals when they dare depart from what the majority decide.

Share on Social Networks

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

Related Posts