Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Archive for the ‘Property Rights’ Category

This is a fantastic documentary!  I highly recommend that you get a copy and show it to your church, small group, and friends, whether believers or not!

View on YouTube – Part 1

View on YouTube – Part 2

View on YouTube – Part 3

View on YouTube – Part 4

View on YouTube – Part 5

Can Christians be Capitalists?

The 5 Big Lies About American Business: Combating Smears Against the Free Market Economy

Money, Greed, and GodThe Ugly Side of “Social Justice” Theology

Evangelical Left Twists the Gospel in ‘Social Justice’ Fervor

Barack Obama’s Marxist Spiritual Advisor

Is Socialism Biblical?

The Base Metal of Christian Socialism

TRUE Social Justice: Transforming Lives In Need

At first glance, this may seem like an arrogant question.  What right do any of us have to assume that God is on our side?   As Abraham Lincoln said, “I know the Lord is always on the side of right; but God is my witness that it is my constant anxiety and prayer that both myself and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”

How, then, do we know if we are on God’s side?  By studying His Word.  The more I study the arguments of liberals in regards to “justice” and “compassion”, the more I realize that they often define these terms as Marx did, not as the scriptures do.   That can make a huge difference in how one interprets scriptures which talk about justice and the poor, causing the reader to read socialist interpretations into the scriptures which are not there and twist the meaning to fit their worldview.  May we always be vigilant to allow God’s Word to shape our worldview, not the other way around. 

For more than a hundred years liberals and conservatives have been arguing over the true meaning of justice. The left emphasizes just outcomes—seeking smaller gaps between rich and poor, and a comparably dignified standard of living for all members of society. The right stresses just procedures –making sure that individuals keep the fruits of their own labors and remain secure in their property, without seizure by their neighbors or by government.

Liberals accept unequal, potentially unfair treatment by government in order to achieve fair results; conservatives accept unequal, potentially unfair results so long as every citizen receives fair and comparable treatment by government.

These arguments have raged for generations without definitive resolution, but that doesn’t mean that both sides are right, or that the questions that divide them offer no final answers. In fact, key Biblical passages provide a strong indication that conservative concepts of economic justice comport far more closely to the religious and philosophical foundations of western civilization. If the Bible is indeed the word of God (as a big majority of Americans say they believe it is), then it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that the Almighty would cast his all-important ballot for Republicans.

For instance, as the weeks count down to the Jewish New Year this September, congregations around the world all read the same weekly Torah portions from the Book of Deuteronomy, including the famous exhortation, “Justice, justice, shall you pursue.” (Chapter 16, Verse 20). The obvious question on this verse is why the Bible repeats the Hebrew word, “Tzedek” – which means both “justice,” and “righteousness”. A great Polish sage from the late 1700’s, Rabbi Bunam of P’schischa, recorded a profound answer from the Tradition. The text uses the word “Tzedek” twice to make sure that when you pursue justice, you only use just-and righteous-means. In other words, the Biblical view directly contradicts the leftist inclination: no, you can’t unjustly confiscate wealth from those who created it to fulfill the righteous goal of helping the poor. The Bible insists that no matter how worthy your purposes, you must employ only righteous means in achieving them.

This understanding turns up repeatedly in Scripture. For instance, a key passage in the Book of Leviticus (19:15) declares: “You shall not commit a perversion of justice; you shall not favor the poor and you shall not honor the great; with righteousness (Tzedek) shall you judge your fellow.” Amazingly, the Bible warns us not to “favor the poor” even before we’re instructed “not to honor the great,” because partiality for the unfortunate counts as an even stronger human temptation.

And what about all the Biblical demands, in both Old and New Testaments, to show compassion to widows, orphans and the poor?

Read more at Townhall.com

‘Social Justice’ Versus Biblical Justice

The Ugly Side of “Social Justice” Theology

Evangelical Left Twists the Gospel in ‘Social Justice’ Fervor

Barack Obama’s Marxist Spiritual Advisor

TRUE Social Justice: Transforming Lives In Need

Is the Tea Party a Christian Movement?

The real costs of Social Security far exceed the taxes collected: The compulsory pay-as-you-go retirement system has denied people the choice of using those funds for private investment, diminished the culture of responsibility and strengthened the redistributive state. People have become more dependent on government, and the retirement decision has become politicized. Social Security now accounts for 20% of the U.S. budget, with expenditures of $686 billion last year.

Reforms in 1977 and 1983 increased payroll taxes and the retirement age, but made no fundamental changes to the system in terms of empowering workers by allowing them to put part of their Social Security taxes in personal accounts.

The U.S. system has accumulated surpluses, but they have been used to expand the size and scope of government. The so-called trust fund has no real assets, only IOUs that taxpayers must eventually pay.

In contrast, Chile’s Social Security Reform Act of 1980 allowed workers to opt out of the defined benefit plan and set up personal accounts. Today Chilean workers are no longer burdened with payroll taxes and no longer dependent on government for their retirement income.

The lack of private property rights in Social Security means that individuals have no secure claim to future benefits and cannot pass them on as part of their estates.

The Supreme Court has ruled that Congress has the power to change promised benefits or other terms of the “social contract” — that is, Congress has the power to break the contract and to renege on past promises.

Indeed, Social Security statements now state: “Congress has made changes to the law in the past and can do so at any time. The law governing benefit amounts may change because, by 2037, the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 76% of scheduled benefits.”

What kind of a contract is that? Would anyone voluntarily sign such an uncertain agreement? Of course not! That’s why Social Security is compulsory.

The deal is bound to get worse. This year OASDI will run a deficit of $41 billion, with a smaller deficit in 2011, and surpluses in 2012-14. Beginning in 2015, revenues will be insufficient to pay full benefits, according to the just-released Social Security Trustees’ Annual Report to Congress, and the cash-flow deficit will rapidly increase.

Read more at the CATO Institute

Is the Welfare State a Ponzi Scheme?

The Entitlement Rip-Off

In the Red: Social Security to See Payout Exceed Pay-In This Year

300 Million, Social Security, and Solvency

Obama’s Pension Grab

U.S. Will be Like Greece in ‘Seven to 10 Years,’ Say Congressmen, Experts

Social Security Reform: A Free-Market Alternative

There go the 4th and 5th Amendments!

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno’s privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the “curtilage,” a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government’s intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Read more at Yahoo News

Senate Democrats Pass Bill Allowing Govt to Collect Addresses, ATM Records of Bank Customers

The Cyber Space Two Step: Privacy vs. Washington’s Big Brother Agenda

View on YouTube – Part 1

View on YouTube – Part 2

View on YouTube – Part 3

View on YouTube – Part 4

View on YouTube – Part 5

View on YouTube – Part 6

Attacks on Freedom

The Original Tea Party

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The Civil War and Gilded Age

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Progressivism

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FDR’s State And LBJ’s Society

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Big Gov’t and Tea Parties

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The Constitution and Freedom

Woodrow Wilson and the roots of Progressivism

Barack Obama and “The Second Bill of Rights”

America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution

We the Serfs

WHO has changed how the constitution is interpreted?

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“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced –a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.“   – From ICLEI‘s “Agenda 21“, signed by G.H. Bush, 1992

One reason that Portland is so hell-bent on pursuing unsustainable “sustainability” projects is that they’ve signed an ICLEI agreement to reduce carbon emissions by up to 80%, making themselves accountable to an international body of radical environmentalists who don’t have to live with the results at the local level.

Agenda 21 and the United Nations

Freedom Advocates explains the danger:

Right now, in your town and neighborhood, policies are being implemented that will ultimately eliminate your freedoms and destroy your way of life. You need to know what’s going on to stop this process. Many town officials are selling us out to global regional development with help from the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI): Local Governments for Sustainability. ICLEI is used as one of the mechanisms to undo the political recognition of unalienable rights.

ICLEI uses the false premise and outright lies of anthropogenic* global warming to change our way of life, for the worse!

ICLEI: Local Governments for Sustainability promotes Local Action 21, Local Agenda 21 and other United Nations programmes implemented through local town councils, planners, mayors and local governments.

Why should you care?

Social engineering and behavior modification are some of the true objectives being implemented under the guise of environmental and climate protection. This is accomplished by exploiting people’s desire to maintain a healthy and lasting environment in the name of “sustainability.” Here is an example of how ICLEI changes behavior, jut like another organization called “Fostering Sustainable Behavior”.

It is also ICLEI’s job to implement United Nation’s policies that restructure our representative form of government through global and regional development (< click and then view slide show). Policies and programs take control from our representative government and put it into the hands of regional, non-elected boards.  This allows elected officials to shirk their responsibilities. It turns us into a soviet system that is based on Regionalism.  It facilitates both communism and fascism. Representative government with defined limits is the basis of a free and just society.

Cool Mayors Fire-up Hot Debate

ICLEI methods include infiltrating local government. Organization representatives seek to be hired into local planning departments or they provide “toolkits” to staff. Too many elected officials such as Cool Mayors allow ICLEI to influence policy changes through the use of funding incentives and rewards. While some of these policies sound good on the surface, they result in consequences such as:

• High-density housing scams
• Traffic congestion
• Open space where access is not allowed
• Government “partnering” with favored private businesses and non-profit agencies, using your tax money
• Undermining Constitutional administration of government
• Managed control over your life
• Mismanagement of public utilities
• Prohibitions on natural resource management leading to increased fire hazards, lack of water, and private property restrictions,
• Increased taxes, fees, regulations and restrictions

Is ICLEI running your town or coming to a town near you?

Are your elected officials being lured into enacting ridiculous rules and regulations in exchange for funding?  Do your elected officials know that there are long term consequences to their irresponsible actions?

Currently there are more than 550 communities in North America paying membership dues to ICLEI.  Upon becoming a member of ICLEI, members become governed by ICLEI Charter. If your community is one of these, you are paying for the loss of your unalienable rights.

Has your town, city or county signed on with ICLEI?  Find out here.

Patriot and AFP activist Roxanne Ross wrote an editorial on page 7 of the August edition of the Northwest Connection about how the ICLEI agenda threatens Multnomah county.

ICLEI is behind national schemes, as well:

How Obama is Locking Up Our Land

And now: The stealth Obama ocean grab

David Horowitz on Democrats’ Shadow Cabinet and the Green Communists

Global Warming Alarmism is a Grave Threat to our Liberty

Environmentalism: The New Communism

It’s not enough that the White House is moving to lock up hundreds of millions of acres of land in the name of environmental protection. The Obama administration’s neon green radicals are also training their sights on the deep blue seas. The president’s grabby-handed bureaucrats have been empowered through executive order to seize unprecedented control from states and localities over “conservation, economic activity, user conflict and sustainable use of the ocean, our coasts and the Great Lakes.”

Democrats have tried and failed to pass “comprehensive” federal oceans management legislation five years in a row. The so-called “Oceans 21″ bill, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Sam Farr of California, went nowhere fast. Among the top reasons: bipartisan concerns about the economic impact of closing off widespread access to recreational fishing. The bill also would have handed environmentalists another punitive litigation weapon under the guise of “ecosystem management.” Instead of accepting defeat, the green lobby simply circumvented the legislative process altogether.

In late July, President Obama established a behemoth 27-member “National Ocean Council” with the stroke of a pen. Farr gloated: “We already have a Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act. With today’s executive order, President Obama in effect creates a Clean Ocean Act.” And not a single hearing needed to be held. Not a single amendment considered. Not a single vote cast. Who gives a flying fish about transparency and the deliberative process? The oceans are dying!

The panel will have the power to implement “coastal and marine spatial plans” and to ensure that all executive agencies, departments and offices abide by their determinations. The panel has also been granted authority to establish regional advisory committees that overlap with existing regional and local authorities governing marine and coastal planning.

No wonder the anti-growth, anti-development, anti-jobs zealots are cheering. The National Ocean Council is co-chaired by wackadoodle science czar John Holdren (notorious for his cheerful musings about eugenics, mass sterilization and forced abortions to protect Mother Earth and for hyping weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich) and White House Council on Environmental Quality head Nancy Sutley (best known as the immediate boss of disgraced green jobs czar/self-avowed communist Van Jones).

Read more at Michelle Malkin

How Obama is Locking Up Our Land

Global Warming Alarmism is a Grave Threat to our Liberty

“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.” ~ Ronald Reagan

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Here come the food police – literally!

When the 20 agents arrived bearing a search warrant at her Ventura County farmhouse door at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday a couple weeks back, Sharon Palmer didn’t know what to say. This was the third time she was being raided in 18 months, and she had thought she was on her way to resolving the problem over labeling of her goat cheese that prompted the other two raids. (In addition to producing goat’s milk, she raises cattle, pigs, and chickens, and makes the meat available via a CSA.)

But her 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, wasn’t the least bit tongue-tied. “She started back-talking to them,” recalls Palmer. “She said, ‘If you take my computer again, I can’t do my homework.’ This would be the third computer we will have lost. I still haven’t gotten the computers back that they took in the previous two raids.”

As part of a five-hour-plus search of her barn and home, the agents — from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, Los Angeles County Sheriff, Ventura County Sheriff, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture — took the replacement computer, along with milk she feeds her chickens and pigs.
 
While no one will say officially what the purpose of this latest raid was, aside from being part of an investigation in progress, what is very clear is that government raids of producers, distributors, and even consumers of nutritionally dense foods appear to be happening ever more frequently. Sometimes they are meant to counter raw dairy production, other times to challenge private food organizations over whether they should be licensed as food retailers.

What’s behind all these raids? They seem to stem from increasing concern at both the state and federal level about the spread of private food groups that have sprung up around the country in recent years — food clubs and buying groups to provide specialized local products that are generally unavailable in groceries, like grass-fed meats, pastured eggs, fermented foods, and, in some cases, raw dairy products. Because they are private and limited to consumers who sign up for membership, these groups generally avoid obtaining retail and public health licenses required of retailers that sell to the general public. (For more on what’s behind the raids, see this new post.)

Read more at Grist

S510 Vote Delayed, But Not Defeated

Food freedom under attack

The FDA vs Raw Milk and the Constitution

Delia Lopez: Our government has gone Gestapo

The Oregon Consumers and Farmers Association endorses Delia Lopez for Congress

“We the people” are the familiar opening words of the Constitution of the United States– the framework for a self-governing people, free from the arbitrary edicts of rulers. It was the blueprint for America, and the success of America made that blueprint something that other nations sought to follow.

At the time when it was written, however, the Constitution was a radical departure from the autocratic governments of the 18th century. Since it was something so new and different, the reasons for the Constitution’s provisions were spelled out in “The Federalist,” a book written by three of the writers of the Constitution, as a sort of instruction guide to a new product.

The Constitution was not only a challenge to the despotic governments of its time, it has been a continuing challenge– to this day– to all those who think that ordinary people should be ruled by their betters, whether an elite of blood, or of books or of whatever else gives people a puffed-up sense of importance.

While the kings of old have faded into the mists of history, the principle of the divine rights of kings to impose whatever they wish on the masses lives on today in the rampaging presumptions of those who consider themselves anointed to impose their notions on others.

The Constitution of the United States is the biggest single obstacle to the carrying out of such rampaging presumptions, so it is not surprising that those with such presumptions have led the way in denigrating, undermining and evading the Constitution.

Read more of Part I at the Patriot Post

Dismantling America: Part II

Dismantling America: Part III

Dismantling America: Part IV

WHO has changed how the constitution is interpreted?

Thomas Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution and author of Dismantling America, discusses, with Hoover research fellow Peter Robinson, why he believes America is collapsing.

View on YouTube: Part 1

Thomas Sowell discusses same-sex marriage and judges who legislate from the bench.

View on YouTube: Part 2

American Collapse: Chapter 3
Thomas Sowell says a loss of personal responsibility is at the heart of the decline of American society.

Libertarian Economist Thomas Sowell on Property Rights

Next on the government takeover list: your private property!

Have you heard of the “Great Outdoors Initiative”? Chances are, you haven’t. But across the country, White House officials have been meeting quietly with environmental groups to map out government plans for acquiring untold millions of acres of both public and private land. It’s another stealthy power grab through executive order that promises to radically transform the American way of life.

Property owners have every reason to be worried. The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) is a pet project of green radicals, who want the decades-old government slush fund for buying up private lands to be freed from congressional appropriations oversight. It’s paid for primarily with receipts from the government’s offshore oil and gas leases. Both Senate and House Democrats have included $900 million in full LWCF funding, not subject to congressional approval, in their energy/BP oil spill legislative packages. The Democrats have also included a provision in these packages that would require the federal government to take over energy permitting in state waters, which provoked an outcry from Texas state officials, who sent a letter of protest to Capitol Hill last month:

“In light of federal failures, it is incomprehensible that the United States Congress is entertaining proposals that expand federal authority over oil and gas drilling in state water and lands long regulated by states… Given the track record, putting the federal government in charge of energy production on state land and waters not only breaks years of successful precedent and threatens the 10th Amendment to the United Sates Constitution, but it also undermines common sense and threatens the environmental and economy security of our state’s citizens.”

This power grab, masquerading as a feel-good, all-American recreation program, comes on top of a separate, property-usurping initiative exposed by GOP Rep. Robert Bishop and Sen. Jim DeMint earlier this spring. According to an internal, 21-page Obama administration memo, 17 energy-rich areas in 11 states have been targeted as potential federal “monuments.” The lives of coyotes, deer and prairie dogs would be elevated above states’ needs to generate jobs, tourism business and energy solutions.

Read more at Real Clear Politics

White House land grab

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“Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.” ~ Samuel Adams

“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.” ~ Frederic Bastiat

Independence and the Right to Private Property

What Freedom Can Do For a Country

Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?

This is you get when the government refuses to honor one of its few, legitimate duties: national defense!  We now have smugglers and drug cartels invading our country in droves, putting the lives of our citizens and law enforcement at risk, and this administration does…nothing.

Fighting Cartels on the Arizona Border – Outmanned and Outgunned

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Sheriff Larry Dever of Cochise County, Ariz., one of four Arizona counties contiguous with the U.S-Mexico border, said Friday that the U.S. Border Patrol has pulled back from parts of the border in his and neighboring counties because manning those areas has become too dangerous.
 
“And you frankly have Border Patrolmen–and I know this from talking to Border Patrol agents—who will not allow their agents to work on the border because it is too dangerous,” Dever told CNSNews.com in a videotaped interview. “Now what kind of message is that for crying out loud?”

Dever, a native of Cochise County, has been in local law enforcement in the county for three decades. He was elected the county sheriff in 1996.

Dever stressed that the Border Patrolmen are ready and willing to perform their mission of securing the border, but that Border Patrol managers had determined that in “some places” the danger was too great and they wanted to avoid the risk of an international incident such as a cross-border firefight.
 
“Now, I am telling you, the agents, you give them a mission, you tell them what you want them to do, they will go do it,” said Dever. “I mean, these guys for the most part are warriors, they are soldiers.
 
“Then you have middle management and upper management that says: No, it’s too dangerous right there and we’re going to cause an international incident if there’s shooting across the line, back and forth,” said Dever.
 
“Well, I say: Come, bring it on. Let’s cause the international incident,” he said.

Read more at CNS News

The case for impeachment: Obama has violated his oath of office over immigration

Hezbollah Terrorists On Our Southern Border

Arizona Sheriff: ‘Our Own Government Has Become Our Enemy’

Troubled Asset Relief Program Inspector General Neal M. Barofsky has found that many of the General Motors and Chrysler dealerships ordered closed by the Obama administration, after last year’s bailouts, were victims of out-and-out, blatant, racial, gender and even political bias.

According to Barofsky’s report, 2,000 dealerships were forced to close, which cost 100,000 jobs.

(See the entire 45-page report here. Read all of it. It is very blunt.)

However, the businesses allowed to stay open “were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority-or woman-owned dealerships.”

The report also indicates a political bias may have come into play, due to a disproportionate number of dealership closings in rural areas, even though the closures could “jeopardize the return to profitability” for both GM and Chrysler.

Barofsky states: “ultimately close to half of all of the GM dealerships identified for termination were in rural areas.”

Of course, in 2008, Obama lost the vote in the nation’s 1,300 rural counties by close to 80 percent.

Perhaps, most troubling of all was the statement made last week, to American Thinker magazine by Obama’s manufacturing czar, Ron Bloom, that the dealerships could have been kept open, “but that doing so would have been inconsistent with the President’s mandate for ‘shared sacrifice.’”

With this report, we witness yet another example of institutional racism by the Obama administration. While we know that Obama is willing to sit by and allow the New Black Panthers to intimidate white voters to stay away from the polls on election day, we now see that he is also willing to take away one’s livelihood, based on the color of their skin.

Read more at Uncoverage

Dealer: Chrysler shutdowns are unfair

Obama closes successful dealerships for political reasons

The most dangerous president in history

A new battle is erupting across Minnesota’s lake country.

In the first widespread action of its kind, the state has sent more than 600 letters to property owners across Minnesota who rent their cabins for a week or less. In an attempt to enforce an existing law more vigorously, the letters warn that the owners might need to buy a license and undergo inspections — the same rules that apply to hotels, motels and resorts.

Resort owners whose complaints helped prompt the letters argue that everyone needs to play by the same rules to ensure the health and safety of travelers. But for the cabin owners, the state action smacks of bureaucratic over-reach.

Julie Lien and her sister got their notice after they made their cabin near Fergus Falls available for the occasional short-term rental.

“They don’t have a right to come in and tell us what we can and cannot do with our private property,” said Lien, who decided to rent her place because of rising property taxes and other costs. “I think it’s Big Brother stepping in and intruding into our lives.”

The conflict comes amid an explosion in private home rentals on the state’s lakes. For cabin owners out of work or struggling to pay bills, their second homes have become a way to supplement their incomes. For others, the rentals are a means to hang on to a family cabin they can’t otherwise afford.

Three years ago, those cash-strapped cabin owners could sell. Not anymore.

“It’s a reflection of the economy,” said John Edman, director of Explore Minnesota Tourism, which has tried to remain neutral but posted an interpretation of the rules on its website.

Read more at the Minneapolis Star Tribune