trouble with county taking apart appliances in my yard

[FLimits]

I personally do not care what my neighbor has or does in his yard

Again, if you were selling your house because you needed money, and your neighbor was doing something that decreased its value, then would you care?

Of course, property values aren't the only thing that can be affected by the activities of your neighbors. Suppose you lived in a suburb, had a 1/2-acre yard, and were surrounded on all sides by other houses. How would you feel if one of your neighbors was doing something on his property that posed a potential danger to the area?

How would you feel if your neighbor did something that *he* believed was safe but *you* thought was dangerous? For example, let's say, just for the sake of argument, that you considered pit bulls dangerous and didn't want your kids to go near them. What if somebody moved into the house right across the street from you who always had at least 20 pit bulls running loose in his yard (with a chain-link fence) because he breeds them to make extra cash? Would you check to find out if that was legal? Would you want your kids to go anywhere near his yard if you thought his dogs might be dangerous?
(By the way, just so nobody gets the wrong idea, I used pit bulls in this example because so many people are afraid of them.)

What if your neighbor constantly did something that didn't harm the value of anybody's property or seem dangerous, but was disruptive? For example, if your neighbor made a lot of loud noise every night that prevented people from sleeping, would you care? How about if *every time* you went outside to work in your yard or to have a barbecue, your neighbor was playing some kind of music that you hate so loud that you couldn't ignore it? Would that affect your ability to enjoy your yard? Would you ever ask him to turn it down?

i do not need to be corrected, informed, aware, condoned, educated, scolded, or even bothered about what is on my land. also the only line around here to step over would be my property line, and i do not step over it.

OK, well, I am trying to share some information with you, so I guess you could say I'm trying to "inform" you, but I hope you won't think I'm trying to "scold" or "correct" you. I'm just telling you how I see certain things based on my own experiences, which is exactly what you did in your post. Often the same thing will look different to two people because each of them is seeing it from a different angle.

As for property rights, I agree that the idea of doing as we please on our own property sounds reasonable, as long as we're not harming others. If we all lived in relative isolation, that would be the end of the story. The problem is that a huge majority of us live near other people, and the activities of our neighbors really can affect our lives, for better or for worse. The average residential lot in the US is less than 1/2 acre -- your property is 10 times that size. When a number of people own properties in close proximity to one another, they become stakeholders in a whole neighborhood, whether they want to or not. They're like a group of people all packed into one rowboat, where the movements of each person affect what the boat does. In a situation like that, if one person decides he can do as he pleases and it's nobody else's business, the other folks who are stuck in the boat with him are probably going to object.

This is very different from your circumstances. You live on nearly 5 acres of your own property. Your closest neighbor might not even be able to see your house. You can sit in any room of your house and expect not to be disturbed by anyone but your own family. You can probably get up at 4 a.m., go outside, and start up a loud machine without worrying about waking up 6 other households. When you walk out your front door, you don't see another person's front door 40 ft ahead of you. You can choose not to see and talk to your neighbors every day. When you say, "I don't care about what others think of how I live," you don't have to consider the 30 other little houses on your street inhabited by other hardworking families.

Ultimately, I think you and I share certain basic principles; our differences arise when we apply those principles in the context of our own experiences because we live in environments where our actions as individuals have very different consequences. I can understand why you cherish the freedom you have, even though I've never enjoyed it on any property I've ever owned. I hope I've helped you understand why some of us, under circumstances very different from yours, choose to limit some of our individual liberties -- and why we might object if one of our neighbors asserts his own individual liberties to the detriment of the rest of us.