Tag: vegetable gardening

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Common Sense free trade & free markets general freedom property rights responsibility

Farming Is Fundamental

garden, food, freedom

If you live in Maine, you may now grow your own food. The right to do so has been safeguarded in the state constitution.

If you have the right to life and to sustain your life, surely you have a right to farm. As we all know, though, governments regularly find excuses to interfere with all kinds of peaceful activities.

So this past November, Maine voters passed a constitutional amendment authored by Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham (whose energetic campaigns for freedom have previously caught Common Sense notice) and proposed by the legislature. 

Maine’s Right to Food Amendment makes clear that “All individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable … right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume . . . as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights public lands or natural resources in the harvesting, production or acquisition of food.” (So there’s no California-​style de facto “right” to loot.)

Foes of the amendment worry that it will enable people to bypass regulations.

Let’s hope so. 

Don’t we want the new law to ban governments in Maine from banning agriculture for the sake of “esthetics,” protecting Big Milk, or any other rationalization for foiling farming on a person’s own property?

And for the idea to spread to the other states, where far too often the scales of justice don’t properly consider the citizen’s right to produce food against the bureaucrat’s regulations frustrating same. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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property rights

Banned in Miami!!…Vegetable Gardens?

Perhaps Hermine Ricketts should be glad that a SWAT team didn’t descend upon on her front-​yard garden. After all, in blatant if ignorant violation of a new zoning law, the former architect had been growing vegetables there.

Yes. Vegetables!

Several months ago, a Miami Shores zoning inspector happened by (doubtless alerted by a troublemaking neighbor) and told Ricketts that she must uproot the vegetables, now illegal because the village council is okay with seeing fruits and flowers in a front-​yard garden but has a thing about veggies.

Hermine Ricketts complained to the code enforcement board but was rebuffed. She therefore obeyed the order to uproot vegetables from the garden that she had been tending without controversy for 17 years. But she and her husband Tom Carroll are also taking their case to court with the help of the Institute for Justice, the ubiquitous champion of property rights.

“You can plant fruit, you can have flowers, you can adorn your property with pink flamingos— but you cannot have vegetables!” exclaims Ari Bargill, a lawyer with the Institute. “That is almost the definition of irrationality.”

The couple’s back yard is mostly in the shade because of the way the house is positioned, so relegating the vegetables to the rear isn’t really an alternative. However, that’s irrelevant. Front yard or back, it’s their own property from which their own kale and cabbage are being banned. The city doesn’t own the plot; Tom and Hermine do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.