© 2023 Concerned Citizens of Western Montana

Happy New Year!

Over the years, this blog has tried to analyze the Flathead Water Compact in an effort to make it more understandable by slicing an dicing the numbers, reviewing it in the context of the history of the former Flathead Indian Reservation, and to add context through scrutiny of legislative and tribal activities through the public record.

We’ve succeeded in some respects, but also have failed in others.

As you all know, it is difficult if not nearly impossible to break down a 1,500 page monstrosity into an easy to understand summary. No one wants to look at the whole deal, they only want the Cliffsnotes version.

Many of the charts and data we’ve provided through the years have helped to provide a big picture of the overreach represented in the Compact, but they do not speak to the absolute assault and violation of our rights and protections that this compact represents.

We firmly believe that as citizens, it is incumbent upon each of us to understand that we no longer have a government or governments that serve to protect the interests of WE THE PEOPLE.   Their interests instead lie with serving the interests of big business, the governments and political elite of our own and other countries throughout the world, and more importantly the agenda of  what has become  an illegitimate and out of control federal government that is now run by its “agencies.”

We believe that through Christmas Eve Omnibus packages, military spending bills and the like, that Congress now serves to enrich governments and themselves by redistributing the wealth of our own and other countries and their people, to the political elite.

The Flathead Water Compact, itself ratified within the  December 2020 Consolidated Appropriations Act, is clearly such a redistribution.

We cannot let Montana off the hook on this.  The state is just as complicit in this theft as the federal government.  The compact would not be possible without Montana’s approval.

How does one even begin to explain just how repugnant the premises and goals of this compact are, in the context of what has become a never ending assault on our unalienable God given rights, one executive order, one unconstitutional bill at a time?

With this in mind, would like to start off the new year with a short essay titled “On Property”, written by founder James Madison.  29 Mar. 1792Papers 14:266–68

Our thanks a dear friend who often points us to this short essay, that will not take long to read.

We respectfully ask that you consider the Flathead Water Compact and its Unitary Management Board in the context of the meaning of property rights as Madison explains in his essay.

Our right to property is as untouchable as our freedom of speech, press, religion and conscience. In fact, Madison views the concept of property as fundamental, and pertaining to far more than material possessions.

There is no “just compensation” for the very things that the Flathead Compact proposes to destroy.  Unalienable rights are unalienable. They cannot be taken or given away, for as much as government may try. 

On Property, Essay by James Madison
29 Mar. 1792

This term in its particular application means “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.”

In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to everyone else the like advantage.

In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property.

In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.

He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.

He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.

He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.

In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho’ from an opposite cause.

Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.

According to this standard of merit, the praise of affording a just securing to property, should be sparingly bestowed on a government which, however scrupulously guarding the possessions of individuals, does not protect them in the enjoyment and communication of their opinions, in which they have an equal, and in the estimation of some, a more valuable property.

More sparingly should this praise be allowed to a government, where a man’s religious rights are violated by penalties, or fettered by tests, or taxed by a hierarchy. Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man’s house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man’s conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest. A magistrate issuing his warrants to a press gang, would be in his proper functions in Turkey or Indostan, under appellations proverbial of the most compleat despotism.

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called. What must be the spirit of legislation where a manufacturer of linen cloth is forbidden to bury his own child in a linen shroud, in order to favour his neighbour who manufactures woolen cloth; where the manufacturer and wearer of woolen cloth are again forbidden the oeconomical [Volume 1, Page 599] use of buttons of that material, in favor of the manufacturer of buttons of other materials!

A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species: where arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied, by an unfeeling policy, as another spur; in violation of that sacred property, which Heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him, in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities.

If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property; which provides that none shall be taken directly even for public use without indemnification to the owner, and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties; nay more, which indirectly violates their property, in their actual possessions, in the labor that acquires their daily subsistence, and in the hallowed remnant of time which ought to relieve their fatigues and soothe their cares, the influence [inference?] will have been anticipated, that such a government is not a pattern for the United States.

If the United States mean to obtain or deserve the full praise due to wise and just governments, they will equally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights: they will rival the government that most sacredly guards the former; and by repelling its example in violating the latter, will make themselves a pattern to that and all other governments.

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