What's interesting is that none of your fun anecdotes involve the State punishing you, explicitly nor implicitly, for your speech... just private citizens. The Constitution does not protect you from consequence of your speech between private transactions, but it is supposed to safeguard private citizens and the entities they own, operate, and manage from reprisal by the State.
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News Reedy Creek Improvement District and the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District
- Thread starter castlecake2.0
- Start date
Tha Realest
Well-Known Member
Huh? RCID allowed Disney to get a jump on Universal, allowing it to open a full year before its competitor due to the comparatively streamlined permitting process.
This is just alarmist. What purpose would this serve? On what grounds could they do this?
Magic Kingdom opened about 18 years before USF.
We are talking about a business making a choice on how to speak or not speak about something whether it would cause backlash from a political party, a religion, or a government. Everyone wants to scream "They have a right to say what they want" . I am not questioning that. I am saying sometimes you weigh what a choice may result in down the road.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
Disney and Universal never would have followed the same permitting process. In the 1980s the City of Orlando was allowed to enforce the EPCOT Building Code as one of the four model codes local governments were required to enforce (a law that came after the Magic Kingdom opened).
Tha Realest
Well-Known Member
Disney MGM opened a year before USF
Ghost93
Well-Known Member
But a business shouldn't have to fear retaliation from the government due to the first amendment.
There is a huge difference between Disney speaking out about something and customers boycotting them versus a government punishing them for exercising their right to free speech.
Andrew C
You know what's funny?
People can choose to think whatever they want. That’s why we call it a choice. But it’s not a check. And it doesnt change the constitution as it relates to the courts. Unless of course we change the the constitution.
What is a problem is when the other, coequal branches, threaten the courts. Flirt with retaliation. In this thread, I know people care about retaliation.
Chi84
Premium Member
It does risk alienating its customers and facing retaliation from them. But in our country, it does not risk retaliation from the government.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
Government retaliations should not be one of those choices. That being the calculus is a huge problem. This is also not about a single incident and issue. At some point somebody was going to realize that the Reedy Creek Improvement District was a target to try and influence Disney’s creative and management decisions, which is exactly what is happening.
Chi84
Premium Member
But the business does not have to factor in government retaliation. That’s prohibited by our constitution.
I explicitly said it was as close to a check you could have on an entity that is without any functional checks.
Also, you can totally constitutionally threaten the court; the 32nd president did it. Whether the state is within its constitutional rights to issue reprisal against an entity for its speech is the discussion in here.
Andrew C
You know what's funny?
I wasn’t speaking constitutionally. I just said it’s a problem. The courts just came up because that is actually where a lawsuit by Disney would end up. If it got to that point.
Brian
Well-Known Member
I'll give you that, but I think you and I can both agree there's a difference between Lennar building a development and selling the homes off to many individual homebuyers, profiting once, and Disney building an entertainment complex 50+ years ago and continuing to profit off it ever since.
Not to mention the size, influence and value of the respective companies.
If someone breaks into my house, steals my stuff, and stabs me on the way out, I know for darned sure a crime was committed.
peter11435
Well-Known Member
RCID is not as unique as some people here want to believe.
Andrew C
You know what's funny?
Yeah. A lot easier than addressing the constitutionality of something through a lawsuit. Although in your example, that jackass is still entitled to due process.
mikejs78
Well-Known Member
The conservative Heritage Foundation once published an analysis of Reedy Creek, arguing that it was a model for private development and upending bureaucracy, allowing a private company to build something that no one had before while getting government out of the way (remember when small government was all the rage?). The analysis argued that improvement districts like Reedy Creek should be adopted all over the country for companies wanting to build innovative things.
Fascinating how what was once conservative orthodoxy has taken a complete 180 degree turn.
Also - why should the size of the company matter? I thought the idea was that success shouldn't be punished?
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
The difference is that Disney has to keep paying the bills for the infrastructure while the housing developer gets to pass those off to others. You’re still barking up the tree of Disney avoiding some burden. The District implemented a regulatory environment where one largely did not exist. Disney isn’t getting a whole host of services for which they pay the counties.
Why does financial success become a factor? Walt Disney Productions was a rather small company in the 1960s. When did they become too big to pay for their own services and should have started sharing those costs with taxpayers?