My uncle paid almost $2 million (cash) for the building from which he runs his company, where in addition to the administrative offices, lobby and shipping department, he has a nice corner office. He is a smoker. Yet according to California law, he can be fined and even jailed for smoking in his own office -- a fact that pissed him off in the extreme. He was willing to abide by the law for the most part, in that there's no smoking allowed inside the rest of the building.
Today, however, he CAN smoke in his office; but only because he spent thousands of dollars in legal maneuvers to have that one little corner of the building, his office, declared NOT a part of the state of California (I'm not quite sure exactly how, but it's been made a sovereign state or whatever).
How fucked up is it that even after paying $2 million for a building (and paying god knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes, not only on that one transaction, but just by doing business here, I might add), the State can still tell you what to do inside the walls of your own private property? It's not like he's making bombs in there or committing human rights violations for Christ's sake! The man simply wants to be free to light up a cigarette while making business calls, but in order to do so he was forced to pay for extreme legal measures to unshackle himself from the State.
Can any of you lawerly types explain to me how the State can justify their intrusion into this man's actions within his separate, private office inside a building that's his private property?
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03-07-2003
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