[geeks] geeks Digest, Vol 86, Issue 11

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Sat, 23 Jan 2010, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

>> Who would possibly understand a law so asinine?
>
> It's that way in the US, at least in Pennsylvania. Any game is property
> of the people (it is a commonwealth after all). In order to hunt/fish it
> you need a license, and there are restrictions on limiting people access
> to your property to do so.

That's not what I asked.  There's a difference between understanding and
acceptance.  I can accept that politicians will write words on paper as
justification to steal and regulate whatever they want, but that doesn't
make the reasoning of those words any more sound.

Presumably, going back to your original example, the owners of the pond
could put those fish in a barrel and still own them--even if that barrel
had water in it.  Suppose, then, they buried the barrel halfway in the
soil--still theirs?  What about burying the barrel so that its top is
level with the ground--still theirs?  What if it's a really BIG barrel?

At some arbitrary point along that continuum, some politicians decided
that, despite putting his own labor and wealth into selecting the fish,
purchasing the fish, buying the pond, and placing the fish into the pond,
he'd abdicated ownership of the resources he purchased just because he
assembled them in a certain way.  I can accept that, but that doesn't
cause it to make sense.

> you can let the rain water fill it.  If it is filled with water from a
> creek, river, lake, etc, the fish are MINE, MINE I tell you, MINE. :-)

I guess politicians never heard about the water cycle.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Science is what we understand well enough to explain
Elgin, TX         (   to a computer.  Art is everything else we do."
USA                )                                    --Dr. Donald Knuth