The Lost Liberty Hotel: “Part Political Statement and Part Pipedream”
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 01.23.06 | 1:05 AM ET
A group of activists—heroes or wackos, depending on your point of view—descended upon Weare, Vermont this weekend in an effort to rally support to turn U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s 200-year-old farmhouse into an inn they plan to call the “Lost Liberty Hotel.” The Ayn Rand-inspired objectivists and Libertarians that make up most of the group are protesting the Court’s recent decision favoring government power to take private property by eminent domain. What better way to make their point, they say, than attempting to seize the private property of one of the Justices who voted to make such an action possible?
Associated Press writer Kathy McCormack covered the protest and spoke to the organizers.
“This is in the tradition of the Boston Tea Party and the Pine Tree Riot,” Organizer Logan Darrow Clements said, referring to the riot that took place during the winter of 1771-1772, when colonists in Weare beat up officials appointed by King George III who fined them for logging white pines without approval.
“All we’re trying to do is put an end to eminent domain abuse,” Clements said, by having those who advocate or facilitate it “live under it, so they understand why it needs to end.”
The protestors have succeeded in gaining attention and gathering enough signatures to put the matter before the town’s voters in March, but few believe they’ll be able to seize Souter’s property. “Most people here see this as an act of revenge and an improper attack on the judicial system,” State Rep. Neal Kurk told McCormack. “You don’t go after a judge personally because you disagree with his judgments.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
