So, I have your consent to strip-search your wife whenever you come to visit me?.....even if she remains in your car?.....
If you let us know that that is your condition, then by visiting you, we would be giving you our consent. By the same token, if your employer tells you that a search of your vehicle is a condition of employment, then accepting the job means that YOU are giving them consent to search your vehicle. This is why your rights are not being violated. You have the right (not to be searched), but you have chosen not to exercise it, just like disarming yourself to enter a no-guns posted coffee shop.
On the other hand, if you invite us in and
then spring the conditions on us, we should have the option of leaving. In that case, our rights would also be intact.
....and there's a huge (and precedent-defined legal definition) difference between one's personal property and residence and one's business property that one has decided to open to the public...
And that difference is inimical to liberty. Not just the fat cat's liberty, but YOUR liberty. When you say that your property is open to the public, you should be the one defining what that means. As an example, if you run a bookstore/coffeeshop, do you have to allow people to sit and read books without buying anything, or can you throw them out? Do you have to allow loud, obnoxious nerds to take up four tables with a role-playing game?* It should be your decision.
.and demanding that someone surrender their civil rights in order to retain employment (esp. in a high-unemployment economy) is about as coercive as one can get.
Fine, call it coercive if you want. If it is coercion, it is a coercion that free people have a right to use against one another. Your problem is that you can't understand the moral equivalence between a consumers' boycott and an employers' boycott. You think that if someone has more money than you do, they should have fewer rights than you do.
Would you want your employer to do to you what you don't want your gov't (esp. police) to do to you?....
Now you get to the crux of the matter. In a free country, we are free to do many things privately, but very limited in what we can do through government. The citizen can do anything not pr
oscribed by law; the police officer (in his official capacity) can do nothing not pr
escribed by law.
mak:
Since fistful has vigorously avoided addressing my questions...
Bwahahahahaha! I "vigorously avoided" them, huh? Not really. I just sat still at the keyboard.
Look, dude, I told you I don't know the answer to your questions. I can point out obvious things, like I have, but I'm not at all familiar with the legal theorizing concerning how far above or below ground level that property rights extend. Is that good enough for you?
If it helps, I'll let you know that your hovercraft question was stupid and disingenuous, but I didn't think you really needed me to tell you that, and it would have been rude to point out. But since you seem so desperate for answers, there you go.
*No disrespect is intended toward those who play their RPGs politely. It's just that I saw a bunch of obnoxious nerds doing that once.