Keep your government hands in our business

[kinvore.livejournal.com]

This weekend is Memorial Day weekend in the States, where we honor the men and women who died in military service. You'll see all kinds of patriotic fervor during this time, hell even PBS gets involved, but I'm not by any means complaining. Then we get stuff like this:

A property management company is under hot water for telling a tenant that after Memorial Day he has to take down an American Flag that he has on display in his window.

Here's what gets me:

Dawn Price said she now works to amend the federal Freedom to Display the American Flag Act of 2005, which states no "condominium association, cooperative association, or residential real estate management association" may stop someone from flying the American flag. The law, however, does not apply to renters.

First I'm amazed we even have such a law to begin with, and I'm even more amazed that they want it even more intrusive. I thought conservatives didn't want government telling business what to do? Did these tenants not read their contract before signing it? Shouldn't we let the market decide if this is a good business practice?

It just seems like an example of glaring hypocrisy. Freedom is a double-edged sword, and sometimes it means having to tolerate things you don't agree with.

Comments

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

The sovereignty of the particular person is secondary to the sovereignty of all persons collectively via government? Kinda suggests that you'd be okay with the ordinance if it wasn't subsequent to a contract, but rather a law. Six one way, half a dozen the other, from this standpoint.

I posit that the sovereignty of the people is enshrined in their exercising their capacity to engage in liberty, including the ability to contract.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

I'd say that you can't legislate your own rules, and that all contracts are subject to supreme law.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the law is not an end unto itself, which brings into question whether or not the ability for the law to tell people when, where, how, and under what circumstances persons may or may not enter into a contract willingly and free of coercion is, in itself, a just exercise of government authority.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Neither is a contract an end unto itself, and contracts do not have special powers to violate the law. You cannot break the law just because you wrote a contract.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Contracts are an extension of the free will of free persons to come to agreement with one another, or to part company. Ostensibly this is the object of good government and of good contract law, to protect this, and to arbitrate disagreements of contracts, not merely whatever sausage legislatures manage to pass legislatures, and not to protect persons from themselves.

It is not all to dissimilar, this notion that we are to be protected from disfavored contracts, from the conservative notion that the purpose of government is to protect our lives over everything else, liberty included.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

And the law is also an extension of the free will of persons. It's just that this extension is superior to the extension of contracts.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

So, to summarize:

The will of multitudes, first homogenized through the election process and eliminating any nuance of the particular will, then further filtered through the minds of a subset of politicians and how they read the electorate...

...should be superior and control the expression of the will of an irreducible member of society, whose will is undiluted by any process outside himself.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I've said. Perhaps you should stick to what you're saying.