Category: property rights

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crime and punishment general freedom property rights

Rent-Free in Oakland

Covid, rental, eviction, moratorium

The city council of Oakland, California just voted 7-1 to end the town’s pandemic-rationalized moratorium on eviction for nonpayment of rent.

But it’s not over yet.

The moratorium will linger on until July 15. Three years is supposedly insufficient time for tenants to gird themselves to again honor the contract with the persons who provide them with shelter.

And then it still won’t be over.

The council’s slow-walk phaseout comes with a permanent new limitation on what landlords can do. This explains the lone dissenting vote, that of Council member Noel Gallo, who says that the rights of landlords are still being insufficiently protected.

As the text of the legislation passed by the council makes clear, its revision of the city’s “just cause” ordinance further violates the property rights of landlords. In part, the new ordinance provides that any failure to pay rent during the last three years which a tenant can plausibly attribute to the pandemic is sufficient to prevent an eviction, even if not relieving the tenant of the obligation to pay that rent.

Will the reprieve be too late and too little for property owners like John Williams? For the last three years, Williams has been stuck with a freeloading tenant who has been financially able to pay rent but who has refused to do so and refused to move.

The tenant, occupying half of the duplex where he also happens to live, owes him $56,000. And Williams is facing . . . foreclosure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment property rights

It’s a Crime

property rights, rental

Somebody forces his way into your home and insists on hanging around. You can’t eject him yourself, but you manage to contact the police. The police arrive. You prove you’re the owner. The police arrest the intruder and you resume full use of your property.

Patti Peeples and Dawn Tiura want intruders to be treated this same way — as criminals to be thwarted immediately — if owners are away when intruders intrude.

The pair co-own a Jacksonville, Florida, house that they rent out. After the last tenant moved out, two squatters moved in. They were discovered by a handyman.

To evict the squatters, Peeples and Tiura had to go to court to start justice’s slow wheels turning. It took more than a month.

The squatters told police that they’d been conned by a rental scam. But they had recently told the same story to explain their occupancy of another home in the neighborhood. 

Also, they threw a brick and feces at the owners’ car as the owners were driving past the house. 

And after the squatters were finally evicted, the owners discovered massive damage: missing appliances, holes punched in walls.

So, not innocent. Much less sanitary.

“Squatters are nothing more than criminals who are breaking and entering into a house,” Peeples says. “They should not be handled in civil court. They should be treated within the criminal court system.”

There’s certainly no reason to let them linger and wreak revenge for having suffered the inconvenience of being caught.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment property rights

Half-Win for Forfeiture Victim

Civil Asset Forfeiture

In August 2020, Jerry Johnson made a mistake: he carried a large sum of money while flying from Charlotte to Phoenix to buy a semi truck for his business. Police grabbed the cash when he arrived in Phoenix.

Mr. Johnson had decided to use cash to avoid certain fees and on the assumption that traveling with cash is legal.

Perhaps it is legal according to mere law. But police often grab any large amount of cash they see someone carrying. They accuse the naïve owners of drug-running and care nothing about actual evidence.

Threatened with jail when interrogated, Johnson signed a form that, he later understood, stated that the $39,500 was not his. The government kept the cash until he could wrest it back in court.

This, you may remember, is par for the course for civil asset forfeiture in America, where government agents behave like highway robbers.

But in this case — this course — the story didn’t end well for the robbers, for Jerry Johnson has gotten back his money. 

But he has not been made whole. As Land Line points out, in addition to all the time and trouble, there were the legal expenses that Johnson incurred before he obtained the help of Institute for Justice. 

And Johnson also lost business revenue: “There were a lot of business opportunities I’ve missed out on because that money was just sitting in a government account.”

Thankfully, the story is not over, yet, for there are organizations like Pacific Law Foundation and Institute for Justice to help victims of government predation at no charge. In this case, it was Institute for Justice that represented the victim in court.

IJ will continue the case to press for compensation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom property rights Regulating Protest

Don’t Destroy Farmers

farming, Europe, climate change, global warming

It’s lucky that today’s anti-agriculture tyrants weren’t around when the Fertile Crescent was just getting going.

But they’re here now.

And they seem hell-bent on destroying farms.

That’s what thousands upon thousands of European farmers are saying, anyhow, and we should listen to them. After all, they provide the food we eat. We need to eat in order to survive. If we don’t survive, we can’t continue living. So, whatever we do, let’s keep the farmers.

But that’s not current policy, at least in Europe. In the Netherlands, Belgium, and elsewhere, powerful political interests continue their crusade to shut down thousands of farms in the glorious cause of pursuing “climate goals” which, they believe, by being achieved will enable the fine-tuning of the weather and the creation of the best environment.

Or at least to say they gave it the old college try.

“I want to have the possibility to continue my dad’s farm,” Brendt Beyens told the AP. “But right now I feel like the possibility of that happening is slowly shrinking and it’s getting nearly impossible.”

So once again, thousands of tractors are clogging the streets, this time in Brussels, the capital of Belgium (video of the protest is on Twitter). The farmers object to being destroyed. They have a point.

Nor is it just about the livelihoods of sodbusters. With food prices rising worldwide and the threat of serious famine looms in Africa and parts of Asia, it’s also about saving lives.

My advice for today is don’t destroy farmers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets property rights too much government

First, Stop Doing That

zoning, regulations, buildings, permits

If a government’s taxes and regulations are making shelter ever more expensive, what should that government do instead?

Stop pushing the disastrous policies, perhaps?

Unlike some other governors who shall remain nameless (one of them rhymes with “DeSantis”), Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin understands that you don’t make things better by making them worse.

In August, Youngkin bluntly told a state senate committee that Virginia homes are too expensive and that a major cause is government interference with the market: “unnecessary regulations, over-burdensome and inefficient local governments, restrictive zoning policies, and an ideology of fighting tooth and nail against any new development.”

The many bottlenecks include low-density zoning rules that permit only a single house per property. Arlington County, Virginia, is one local government working to reform zoning so that more houses can be built on a property.

In November, Youngkin proposed a Make Virginia Home plan to unravel many regulations. City Journal notes that although the plan is “short on details,” it’s a good start.

Under the governor’s plan, the state would streamline environmental reviews, investigate how to liberalize the state’s building codes and land-use and zoning laws, impose deadlines on local governments to speed up approvals of development, and give local governments incentives to adopt their own market-liberating reforms.

This agenda is indeed only a beginning. But it does recognize a major cause of sky-rocketing housing costs and what must be done to begin to reduce those costs.

That’s just Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly nannyism property rights

Vandalized, Scandalized

grafitti, San Francisco, crime, law

Store owners have another reason to get the heck out of that derelict-enabling and increasingly unlivable town, San Francisco. The city fines businesses for the crime of being vandalized by graffiti artists.

This form of harassing property owners is nothing new, but the city had temporarily reduced enforcement during the pandemic.

The policy is unjust in at least two ways.

First, there should be no fines for being hit by graffiti-vandals. It’s the vandals who should be punished, not the victims. Moreover, as Reason magazine points out, “Unlike accumulated trash, noise, or other standard nuisances, graffiti isn’t inherently offensive.”

Rather, it is the city that is being offensive by treating an owner’s property as if it were its own and penalizing owners if their property lacks the appearance that the city ordains.

Second, even granting the legitimacy of requiring property owners to clean up the graffiti, the policy as imposed is abusive. Businesses are being fined repeatedly for graffiti that they don’t magically remove at lightning speed and that the vandals, undiscouraged, simply slap back on anyway.

“I can’t even count,” Michael McNamara, manager of the restaurant Above Ground (now closed), told the San Francisco Chronicle last year. “The paint dries and you deal with another one.” The city had dunned Above Ground with at least three $300 bills for the graffiti.

Rewarding destructive behavior while punishing those whose way of work and life makes civilization possible is no way to run a city — but it is a way of running the good people out of town.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense free trade & free markets general freedom property rights responsibility

Farming Is Fundamental

garden, food, freedom

If you live in Maine, you may now grow your own food. The right to do so has been safeguarded in the state constitution.

If you have the right to life and to sustain your life, surely you have a right to farm. As we all know, though, governments regularly find excuses to interfere with all kinds of peaceful activities.

So this past November, Maine voters passed a constitutional amendment authored by Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham (whose energetic campaigns for freedom have previously caught Common Sense notice) and proposed by the legislature. 

Maine’s Right to Food Amendment makes clear that “All individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable . . . right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume . . . as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights public lands or natural resources in the harvesting, production or acquisition of food.” (So there’s no California-style de facto “right” to loot.)

Foes of the amendment worry that it will enable people to bypass regulations.

Let’s hope so. 

Don’t we want the new law to ban governments in Maine from banning agriculture for the sake of “esthetics,” protecting Big Milk, or any other rationalization for foiling farming on a person’s own property?

And for the idea to spread to the other states, where far too often the scales of justice don’t properly consider the citizen’s right to produce food against the bureaucrat’s regulations frustrating same. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets property rights

Unions Must Stop

labor union, California

Golden State labor organizers want to be able to trespass on the property of companies to recruit new workers. But companies don’t want their operations periodically disrupted by trespassers.

Typical kind of political disagreement. One party wants its rights to be respected; the other wants to violate those rights.

That was pretty much where things stood in the Golden State until the California Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision last summer, which invalidated the relevant provision of the California law that had empowered unions to disrupt business for hours a day for up to a third of the year.

Let me repeat that: for hours a day for up to a third of the year.

The petitioners in the case were Cedar Point Nursery, which produces strawberries, and Fowler Packing Company, which produces grapes and oranges. Pacific Legal Foundation pursued the litigation on their behalf.

On September 1, a California district court followed up. In light of the high court’s decision, the district court ruled that the state can’t enforce union access without “just compensation” to property owners for temporarily taking their property.

This seems like an unnecessary and contradictory hedge, a misunderstanding of the context in which just compensation for government-authorized taking of a property for public use properly applies (if ever).

But, practically speaking, the rulings mean that California businesses have now escaped at least one of the many hassles that are encouraging so many to flee the state.

PLF attorney Wen Fa says that agricultural businesses in California can now function “without the threat of unions trespassing on their property and disrupting their workplaces.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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judiciary property rights

Landlords Defended, Sorta

Supreme Court, property rights, rent

In late June, the Supreme Court declined to end an unlawful CDC-enacted national moratorium on evictions.

Things have apparently changed. The court just ruled — in a 6-3 decision — that the “balance of equities” has tilted in favor of qualified deference to property rights and letting landlords try to financially survive.

Now it will be easier, or possible, for many beleaguered property owners to maintain properties — on which they depend for their livelihoods and tenants depend for things like heat as well as their residencies.

The three dissenters on the high court say that the “balance of equities” still tilts the other way, in favor of violating the property rights of landlords to help tenants unable or unwilling to pay the rent.

The court’s decision does not mention property rights. It does cite a 1972 precedent that cites other precedents “[requiring] Congress to enact exceedingly clear language if it wishes to significantly alter the balance between federal and state power and the power of the Government over private property.”

Of course, the U.S. Constitution gives Congress no authority to violate individual rights at will — even if it uses exceedingly clear language to do so. The Constitution does not say it’s OK to violate the Constitution.

What now? 

Many landlords are still subject to state or municipal restrictions on evictions that this decision does not overturn. But the ruling may help them press for relief.

And we must hope that the U.S. Congress doesn’t get around to intelligibly re-revoking the rights of property owners.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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property rights

The Maine Alternative to State Robbery

civil asset forfeiture, police, corruption, drug war

Around the country, one of the worst predations against people who save money or own property is civil asset forfeiture.

This is the grabbing of the cash and other belongings of innocent people on the basis of a mere suspicion (or feigned suspicion) of wrongdoing. By government.

No evidence is required by law: no arrest; no conviction. Just the willingness of some police officer, sheriff, or other member of law enforcement to grab what doesn’t belong to him. 

There’s only one cure: state by state, these asset forfeiture laws must be abolished.

The Institute for Justice reports that Maine has now repealed its civil forfeiture law, making it the third state to do so. IJ’s own efforts deserve much of the credit.

Another hero of the story is Billy Bob Faulkingham, one of my favorite legislators and the main sponsor of the bill. (He is also behind a right-to-farm ballot measure and a good voter-ID bill.)

The bipartisan “Act to Strengthen Protections Against Asset Forfeiture” — which passed without the governor’s signature — states that “for property to be forfeited under the criminal forfeiture laws, the owner of the property[must] be convicted of a crime in which the property was involved. . . .”

Is this the end of the injustice?

In Maine, maybe. 

Being on the books doesn’t necessarily mean that a law will be obeyed. But if and when it is violated, victims in the state will now have stronger legal recourse and a much better chance of promptly getting back their stuff.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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