Say Anything Blog

On one hand, flying the American flag upside during a dispute over a liquor license isn’t something I’d do.  On the other hand, the police seizing the man’s American flag is an obvious trampling of his 1st amendment rights, and leads me to believe that maybe this guy has some justification in flying it upside down given the way his local government seems to be treating him.

CRIVITZ — A U.S. flag flown upside down as a protest in this Northeastern Wisconsin village was seized by police before a Fourth of July parade and the businessman who flew it — an Iraq war veteran — claims the officers trespassed and stole his property.

A day after the parade, police returned the flag and the man’s protest — over a liquor license — continued.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin is considering legal action against the village of Crivitz for violating Vito Congine Jr.’s’ First Amendment rights, executive director Chris Ahmuty said.

“It is not often that you see something this blatant,” Ahmuty said. “The fact that police on Independence Day of all days would come onto private property without permission and shut down his protest is very disturbing.”

In mid-June, Congine, 46, began flying the flag upside down — an accepted way to signal distress — outside the restaurant he wants to open in Crivitz, a village of about 1,000 people some 65 miles north of Green Bay.

He said his distress is likely bankruptcy because the village board refused to grant him a liquor license after he spent nearly $200,000 to buy and remodel a downtown building for an Italian supper club.

Going beyond the absurdity of cops taking this guys flag down, let’s stop for a moment to recognize just how often local communities attempt to control their local economy through the application of zoning ordinances, building codes and liquor licenses.  Some of these regulations (not liquor licenses, I think, but the others) are at least based on some level of common sense.  We all have to live with one another, and we have to have some way of ensuring that our respective property rights don’t infringe upon the rights of others.  It’s a tricky balancing act a times.  But politicians have gone so far beyond the application of regulatory law for the sake of public safety that now, in many cases, they’re using regulations to pick and choose what kind of businesses they want in their communities and which kind they don’t.

If a politician decides he or she doesn’t like your business, or even just you, they can pretty much keep you from operating your business by regulating you to death.  Denying your zoning requests.  Denying your liquor license.  Slapping you with absurd building code violations.  But, on the flip side, if they decide they like you or your business (or if you happen to grease their palms a bit) well then suddenly things like zoning and building codes and liquor licenses because inconsequential.

It’s another way in which they turn us into supplicants instead of citizens.

Far too often we allow municipal or township or county authorities to run their local areas like little fiefdoms, where only the right kind of person with the right kind of business can get in.