Law & Justice: August 2007 Archives
From near my old hometown: a Torrence, CA, man gets sentenced to six months in jail for repairing a city-owned fence. Yes, California is completely insane.
He built a fence, a retaining wall, a patio and a few concrete columns to decorate his driveway, and now Francisco Linares is going to jail for it.Linares had been given six months to get final permits for the offending structures or remove them as part of a plea agreement reached in January, when he pleaded no contest to five misdemeanor counts of violating the Rolling Hills Estates building code.
If he failed to do one or the other, Linares faced six months in county jail. ...
Richard Hamar, Linares' attorney, said he has never heard of anything like this.
"We're talking about fixing a fence that was on city property," he said. "He didn't build a Las Vegas casino. You put a guy in jail for six months because he repaired the city fence?"
The 51-year-old bought the nearly 1-acre property in the 4600 block of Palos Verdes Drive North in 1998. After tearing down an adobe house on the site and building a 3,000-square-foot French-style home, he began landscaping.
When Linares asked the city to repair the white three-railed fence behind his house, he was told it was on his property and his responsibility. So he replaced the termite-infested planks. Then the city reversed itself and said Linares had illegally built the fence on city property.
In October 2004, the city charged Linares with three misdemeanors: for not taking down the fence, having a retaining wall built higher than a 2-foot restriction and for erecting stone columns without a neighborhood compatibility analysis. Later inspections found eight other violations, including a lack of permits for plumbing and grading.
Having lived in Southern California and had occasion to deal with the various city bureaucracies, I can only imagine the headaches Mr. Linares went through trying to comply with the regulations.
At the sentencing, Hamar said his client was a good Christian man who has never committed a crime and who worked diligently - 142 hours - to try to resolve the issues with the city.And the only reason he was not able to complete the stipulations of the plea agreement, he said, was because of the city's confusing building codes and negligence in rendering a decision on his permit applications.
Jailing this guy is a severe injustice, not to mention all the legal fees he's racking up. Repairing a fence has essentially ruined Mr. Linares' life, and no just society should tolerate such capricious and pointless prosecution.
I don't normally link to TMZ because it's often not safe for work, but they're reporting that Mexico may drop its extradition of Dog the Bounty Hunter because the statute of limitations has passed.
The group had been charged by a Mexican court with deprivation of liberty, after their 2003 capture of convicted serial rapist Andrew Luster in Puerto Vallarta. Chapman had traveled to Mexico to retrieve the Max Factor cosmetics heir, who was wanted in the U.S. on rape charges. Luster is now in jail, serving a 124-year term.The Chapman crew was jailed for a brief time after the incident as bounty hunting is considered a crime in Mexico. While TMZ could not immediately confirm the ruling (because nosotros hablamos espanol only a little), Dog's attorney told us he "has received a favorable ruling from the people in Puerto Vallarta. The extent of that ruling is unknown as we are still in the process of translating it."
The Mexican prosecutors may appeal that ruling, but I pray they don't.
Ward Farnsworth writes about the difference between those who build and those who bicker.
The idea, to oversimplify only a little, is that there are two general ways to increase your wealth: by creating things people want, or by fighting over prizes that already exist — things other people have created or found. Either strategy might be more successful than the other, and perfectly rational to pursue; it depends on the circumstances. Which do you prefer as your own method of choice? Which do you spend more time doing? Why does it matter?The difference between these methods of gaining wealth — between, say, competing to build a better restaurant and competing to get to the treasure first (rent seeking) — is that the first one creates wealth, or better-offness, for the world. Customers are made happy, and restaurants gradually get better. Fighting over who gets the treasure isn’t like that. The treasure doesn’t get bigger as a result. In a sense it gets smaller because wealth is eaten up in the effort to lay hold of it.
Think of this on a larger scale and you can see that the more a society spends on rent seeking — on quarrels over who gets what — the poorer it becomes. If that’s all that anyone did, everyone would starve in due course.
As Eric at Classical Values points out, this sort of fighting over treasure is why many people hate lawyers.
This reminded me of a life changing event. After spending years running a very popular but commercially unsuccessful nightclub, I was advised (by some attorneys who meant well) that the ideal career change for me would be to sue business owners for non-compliance with the ADA."Attorneys fees are there by statute!" I was told.
Great. Now that I was out of business, I could be born again as a despicable parasite and help ensure that other business owners would be put out of business. It struck me that if I became a homeless derelict, I'd be doing more for the world than if I helped ruin other people's businesses. (It didn't help much that one of the many reasons my business failed was that the building was cited by the fire marshall for inadequate handicapped access, and there was no way to remedy this without major alterations to the building, which I did not own, for patrons in wheelchairs who never came.)
However, it's important to note that competition among builders is not similarly wasteful. Yes, some businesses will fail, but when they do it's because their products were inferior to the others in the same niche The wealth of the losers is lost, but the wealth of the winners is multiplied and society benefits. This phenomenon is known as "creative destruction" in capitalist economies.
What is to be avoided is competition over existing treasure; it is much more efficient for competitors to work together, as cheaply as possible, and distribute the treasure amongst them.
(HT: Instapundit.)
