Jack Elfrink Dot Com

I would like to tell you the story of a guy named Harry. It might not be that obvious what his situation has to do with kink, but I will get around to explaining that part. Now admittedly, the guy is a multi-millionaire, so I know in the eyes of a lot of people that makes his a greedy capitalists pig who doesn’t care about the plight of poor hardworking Americans, but just stick with me for a minute here.

Harry owns a parking lot. He has wanted to develop this property some, by either building apartments or possibly some storefronts. He never got the opportunity to do this however, because the city of Austin TX took his land away from him.

It hasn’t been the first time that Harry has had run ins with the city of Austin over property rights. In 1959 the city of Austin wanted to take some other property but couldn’t do so unless a very unusual bond measure was passed. The bond was put to a vote and the results apparently showed that it passed. However, Harry showed in court that there had been voter fraud in the election for that particular bond measure, thus invalidating the bond measure.

But the city took the land anyway.

In 1990 Harry again went toe-to-toe over property rights, this time with the state of Texas. Voters had approved a bond for building and development. However, the state of Texas took the money from the bond and purchased an already existing building rather than use the money for construction as had been intended by the voters. Harry pushed the state board to invalidate the bond, thereby blocking the purchase of the building. The state legislature, in retaliation, increased the number of positions on the board, then filled those newly created positions with some of its own yes-men. With this new, larger, state board now lopsided in favor of the state, the bond was reinstated and the purchase of the building happened anyway.

Sucks to be Harry? Don’t it? Oh well, even if he hasn’t been successful in keeping government from taking peoples property, at least he put in a good fight.

But things got personal in 1998. The city of Austin was building a convention center. But somehow, they completely forgot that they would need parking for the place. At first they tried working out a deal with a hotel that was across the street, but the hotel backed out. The parking lot that Harry owned was caddy corner across the way, but didn’t have enough space. The city of Austin offered to buy the land so they could construct a higher capacity parking garage instead of just a parking lot. Harry said “no thanks”.

The city condemned his place.

How exactly you condemn a parking lot I still haven’t quite figured out. But Harry was once again caught up in a property-rights battle with the government, this time over his own land. He sued, but while the case was making its way through the courts, the city showed up at his place with some trucks and jackhammers and went ahead and built the parking garage anyway.

Harry finally wins in court, but by this time it was too late. His land had already been ‘taken’ by this point. The city of Austin now faced the prospect of this brand spankin new parking garage they had just built being turned over to Harry. So the city appeals the ruling. It gets appealed over and over again all the way to the state supreme court.

Now I am no legal expert so this next part is a bit confusing to me. The state supreme court refused to hear the appeal. This does two things. First of all, the lower court ruling stands. The land does indeed belong to Harry. Second of all, since the state supreme court never heard the case, there is no ruling from that court that the city of Austin could appeal. Seems as if the city of Austin had reached a dead end.

Now imagine if you will, a wide expansive office deep within the bowels of the government. A large desk sits at one end with a very stern looking man in a suit sitting behind it. Another man enters the office.

“You wanted to see me boss?” says the man who just entered.

“Yeah, I want you to arrange a little ~accident~ four our friend” says the man behind the desk.

“No problem boss. I will take care of it for ya”.

Just a few weeks after the state supreme court vindicated Harry and gave legal ownership of the land clearly into his control, Harry was shot in the face.

Go back and read that again. Its not a misprint. Harry was shot in the face.

Oh sure, the press reports at the time claimed that it was a hunting accident. But the guy who pulled the trigger was a high ranking government official. A very high ranking official. The press made a big deal about the amount of time it took for this official to contact the media, but didn’t say much about who exactly Harry is or any of his battles against the government over issues of property rights. For the entire week that the hunting accident was in the headlines, few people even knew the name of Harry Whittington . To the press, and to the American public he was always just “the one who was shot”.

So what does any of this have to do with kink? There has been talk for a few years now of having a .xxx domain name. If it ever goes into effect, some have suggested requiring all adult content, including any and every website dealing with kink, to be forcibly relocated to the .xxx domain. However, web addresses are considered property, and both legally and ethically people cannot be forced to give up their property without just compensation.

But the government has consistently demonstrated, to Harry Whittington and to others, that it will just up and take your property if it wants it. All it has to do is come up with some flimsy excuse of “for the public good” and what an individual owns will inevitably be seized. All that is needed now, is to claim that protecting children from porn is “for the public good” and virtual property will be seized by the government just as surely as physical property has been seized before.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 8th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Previous blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.