American National GovernmentResponse Question:Consider the various liberties identified in the Bill of Rights. What one liberty should be added to the Bill of Rights? Why?Over the past thirty years there has been an attack on Americans that has gone mainly unnoticed. But this time it is not an attack from a foreign nation or entity. The attack comes from within. The attacks are from homeowner associations on their members. In the nineteen eighties homeowner associations are created to ÃÂmaintain property valuesÃÂ or ÃÂmaintain a level of aestheticsÃÂ. However, as the present is profoundly shaped by the past, we need to look at it to help us better see the present. In the midst of a historical situation, the participants may not always see their present with the clarity. Self-denial, self-delusion, the tyranny of the present, all may shield a participant from the full reality of what they are doing. What will Americans think years from now about the explosive growth of homeowner associations in the latter part of 20th Century? History may provide us some clues.
United States
United States
English: A notice that is posted in all California...Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States. Nobody spoke with the same passion about human rights as he did. He wrote about the universal rights of man, that we are all endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But he possessed over 100 slaves when he wrote those words. He wrote about the inherent right to private property - that nobody has a right to take another's property, yet he simultaneously advocated and engineered that the lands of the Native Americans west of the Appalachians be taken from them.
Homeowner associations represent one of the newer manifestations of this quest. The essence of them is control in order to take money - and in certain circumstances...