Category: property rights

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Fifth Amendment rights property rights

Blight Fight

Institute for Justice, property rights

The government destroyed the new fixer-​upper of handyman Eric Arnold, migrant from New Jersey to Georgia, even as he was diligently renovating it. The rationale of Macon-​Bibb County: fighting blight. 

Blight that Arnold was already fighting himself.

What happened to Arnold was not an isolated occurrence.

Institute for Justice reports that over the last few years, “Macon-​Bibb County has demolished over 800 houses that it has designated as blighted through a fast-​tracked, secret code enforcement process that completely avoids court proceedings and deprives property owners of a meaningful chance to protect their property.”

Sometimes, the county doesn’t even notify owners.

Arnold discovered what was about to happen only because a neighbor alerted him that a demolition crew was installing a dumpster on Arnold’s property. He provided officials with evidence of the improvements he was making. But it was like talking to a brick wall. The county’s only answer was to speed up the process.

“To spend all that time and money and sweat and end up with nothing but a bare piece of land, it’s devastating,” he says.

IJ attorney Dylan Moore says that Macon-​Bibb “should welcome skilled home renovators like Eric with open arms. Instead, county officials made demolishing Eric’s house ‘high priority’ after Eric asked for help.…”

IJ and Arnold are suing the county to try to spare others from the loss that he has been made to suffer without any due process whatever. It’s the county’s unconstitutional system that needs demolishing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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property rights regulation

The Developer’s Lot

New York City, property rights, regulations

If you’re going to own things, don’t own them in New York City.

This town is an epicenter of official looting, as, for instance, what the city’s Parks Department is doing to “perplexed plaintiff” Theodore Trachtenberg.

Trachtenberg owns a lot in New York, on which he hopes to build housing. Before he could proceed, he had to remove a tree from the lot.

“Therefore,” the city — the Parks Department, the city, it’s all the same gang — is fining him $230,000.

Why? Well, they want money is why. If you can invest in NYC housing, this means you have money. 

If a little girl without money were to pluck a dandelion in her back yard, Parks would fine her only a quarter, maybe.

Trachtenberg is suing. The filing says: “Parks did not plant the tree, has never performed any work on, nor took care of the tree, nor has even registered it on its online resource called NYC Tree Map.”

The insanity is slightly complicated by a claim that two small trees on a nearby sidewalk were damaged by the work.

“The ownership of those two trees is not being contested, but the damage is,” says Mikhail Sheynker, Trachtenberg’s lawyer. Sheynker says he hasn’t observed the damage that the city describes.

But he has observed that in the 1990s, “the Parks Department didn’t really issue fines over trees. But they figured out this is a moneymaker.”

Trachtenberg should have developed a tract in some other burg.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies property rights regulation

National Control

Joe Biden, democratic party, money machine

Is federal rent control, just proposed by Commissar Biden, a good idea or bad?

Well, it’s good in one way — great to torpedo the incentives and capital of owners while reducing the supply of rental units and further eroding property rights. 

All of which is bad.

Very bad.

A few details of the economic principles being blithely ignored by Biden and/​or his handlers are explained by The Wall Street Journal (“another classic White House policy contradiction: Subsidize housing, then discourage its development”), Mises​.org, and Breitbart Business, among other places.

What are the chances that this pot shot at the economy will become law in the near future: slim or none?

Slim. 

Not none, unfortunately — we’ve seen too many unthwarted federal attacks on the property rights of landlords and owners, including during the COVID-​19 pandemic.

The chances are considerably more than slim if there’s a Biden Simulacrum 2 administration.

The goal of Biden and/​or his handlers is to make clear to persons who want something for nothing — a goodly percentage of Biden’s constituency — that even a near-​brain-​dead party leader or his puppeteers can come up with scads of new schemes to loot fellow Americans as long as Biden or a Biden-​type is at least nominally in office.

So if you want more pelf, along with an expiring economy with a war of all against all, vote for Biden! 

Or whoever replaces him at the Democratic convention.

If you want freedom, prosperity, respect for property rights and each other, don’t.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fourth Amendment rights judiciary property rights

Against Government Invasion

property, rights, invasion, civil rights

Unconstitutional searches of private property by a renegade Tennessee government agency may be coming to an end.

Unanimously upholding an earlier decision, a Tennessee Court of Appeals has ruled that no, Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency employees have no right to ignore No Trespassing signs on private land — not even to enter it, let alone install cameras there in search of a crime.

The court ruled in a case brought by the Institute for Justice on behalf of Terry Rainwaters and Hunter Hollingsworth.

“TWRA claimed unfettered power to put on full camouflage, invade people’s land, roam around as it pleases, take photos, record videos, sift through ponds, spy on people … all without consent, a warrant, or any meaningful limits on their power,” says IJ attorney Joshua Windham.

“This decision confirms that granting state officials unfettered power to invade private land is anathema to Tennesseans’ most basic constitutional rights.”

The ruling cites the observation of legal scholar John Orth that “‘general warrants’ and ‘writs of assistance,’ authorizing officers to search anyone, anytime, for evidence of any crime” were among the abuses leading to adoption of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibiting “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

“The various state constitutions adopted after the Revolution almost invariably forbade the practices,” Orth notes.

According to the new ruling, Tennessee’s constitution does too. But we may not be quite done. The TWRA can appeal, which means that the case may end up in the Tennessee Supreme Court.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets international affairs property rights

Idaho Foils Foul Harvest

China, organ harvesting, insurance

One can be for free trade yet still demand, while sticking to principle, certain restrictions on international trade.

The State of Idaho has demonstrated one sort of restriction compatible with a free society’s free-​trade rules. “As of July 1, it will be illegal in Idaho for health insurers to cover an organ transplant or post-​transplant care performed in China or any country known to have participated in forced organ harvesting,” explains Frank Fang in The Epoch Times (No. 508, A5). The legislation had been passed unanimously in both legislative houses earlier in the month and was signed by the governor on April 10.

Idaho wasn’t the first state to do this, following Texas last year and Utah this year, with its law going into effect on May 1.

The problem to be addressed? The suspiciously short waiting time for organ transplants in China, especially after the Chinese government cracked down on the Falun Gong decades ago. 

“In 2019, the independent China Tribunal in London concluded that the CCP had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years ‘on a substantial scale,’ with Falun Gong practitioners being the ‘principal source’ of human organs,” according to Mr. Fang.

This is not protectionism. And it really isn’t any unwarranted regulation on trade. For even in the freest of societies, with 100 percent free trade and freedom of contract, the sale and purchase of stolen goods is unlawful.

Rightly prohibited.

If anything has been taken away unjustly, it’s the internal organs of political prisoners by the Chinazis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture judiciary property rights

Must Your Town Become San Francisco?

San Francisco, homelessness, homeless, consequences

I love San Francisco. Such a beautiful city, I thought on a recent visit. 

But then I turned the corner and discovered, once again, that all-​important skill of rapidly averting one’s eyes. 

Where was an escape route?

The city by the bay, like other towns with mild weather, is always going to get more than its share of what we used to call hobos, or — more accurately — bums. Sleeping on the streets there must beat sleeping on Chicago streets in the winter.

Still, Frisco gives added benefits to those living on its streets. Indeed, vagrants can become less vagrant by setting up encampments in public, apparently wherever, toilet facilities optional. An impending Supreme Court ruling may push other cities in the same direction.

The case, Johnson v. City of Grants Pass, Oregon, has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Three vagrants challenged a Grants Pass ordinance prohibiting them “from using a blanket, pillow, or cardboard box for protection from the elements”; in other words, from setting up camp in the street.

In response, the Ninth Circuit blocked Grants Pass from enforcing the ordinance unless it provides shelter to those kicked off the street. Many towns cannot afford such expenditures, especially if the vagrant population is of any great size.

You get more of what you subsidize. If, obeying such rulings, towns do stretch budgets to prevent encampments, they thus encourage vagrants from nearby lands to move into town to get the taxpayer-​funded accommodations.

The Ninth Circuit decision applies to nine states. Now the Supreme Court will either throw out the decision; revise it; or, upholding it, begin to consign all of us in all states to the fate of San Francisco.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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