Category: property rights

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property rights

Not-So-Safe Deposit Boxes

Now hold on just a minute. I’m not one of those crazies who thinks the government is nothing better than a den of thieves constantly looking for new ways to steal from us. So don’t accuse me of making such an accusation. Please.

But, gee whiz, it sure makes the government look bad when obscure federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Justice engage in the mass theft of $85 million worth of property belonging to people accused of no wrongdoing.

It must be one of those oft-repeated wild aberrations.

In March, the federal government conducted a raid of a safe deposit box company called U.S. Privacy Vaults. The government accuses the company of abetting drug dealers.

The government accuses the box renters of . . . nothing. But DOJ is trying to use civil forfeiture laws to retain most of what it seized during the raid: some $85 million in cash and valuables.

The Institute for Justice is thankfully leading a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the victims.

“The government has no basis to think any of these people have done anything wrong,” notes IJ attorney Robert Frommer. “It just wants to keep their stuff. That’s unlawful and unconstitutional.”

One victim, Travis May, a Reason Foundation trustee, adds: “Civil forfeiture is an abomination. This is a clear demonstration of the perverse motive it creates.”

May says that Congress should outlaw civil forfeiture once and for all. I must agree . . . otherwise, we encourage the fandooglishly wacky impression that government is out to steal from us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies property rights

Zoning by “Outsiders”

zoning, property, freedom

“In recent years, there’s been a push to move zoning decisions further from the local level,” writes Matt Ray for Mises Wire — engaging in no small understatement. 

“In 2019, Oregon passed House Bill 2001, making it the first statewide law to abolish single-family zoning in many areas. By expanding the state government’s jurisdiction to include zoning decisions previously handled by local agencies, the law entails an alarming centralization of state power.”

This trend is old, going back at least to the Progressive Era. 

But the trend continues — “progresses” — and Oregon’s centralizing law has been “quickly followed by the introduction of similar bills in Virginia, Washington, Minnesota, and North Carolina,” Matt Ray explains. “Now President Biden is attempting to increase federal influence over local zoning.”

The problem should be obvious. Government land-use regulation by “zoning” is an awesome expression of rights-abridging power, usually becoming nothing more than what most regulations are: special-interest protection schemes, helping the in-crowd at the expense of “outsiders” (you and me, actually).

Most savvy people understand this in specific instances, but not generally, so when they see zoning they don’t like, they might leap to the notion that bad local regulations should be replaced by good state or federal regulators.

Trouble is, we have less ability to ensure that regulators in distant political centers aren’t captured by special interests or malign ideologues. 

The only way out is a general rule-of-law approach, limiting all zoning powers. Barring that? Well, no matter how bad your city’s zoning, I wouldn’t trade it for zoning decisions from Washington.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies property rights

Dereliction of Duty

police, riot, law, protection,

Must governments act to protect you when you or your property are attacked — for example, by rioters who vandalize and burn your store? 

Is the government liable if it willfully lets it happen?

Protection of life and property is the moral obligation of governments constituted for this purpose. But whether officials who ignore the obligation can be held to account is another question.

A Madison Avenue shop, Domus Design Center, is suing the mayor of New York City and the governor of New York State. In late May and early June, hundreds of businesses were damaged by rioters while Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo refused to act to oppose them.

“Where are our tax dollars going?” asks the Center’s attorney, Sal Strazzullo. “Not protecting commercial properties is negligence of duty. Paying taxes that help pay the salary of the NYPD, we expect protection in return. Government is responsible to protect its citizens and businesses against criminals who want to do bad.”

Yes. 

But Strazzullo’s client faces the precedents of rulings in cases like Warren v. District of Columbia, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, and a lawsuit by Parkland, Florida students against the local sheriff’s office. In these cases, plaintiffs argued that law enforcers had a positive duty to protect the plaintiffs when they were being clearly threatened. 

The courts disagreed.

We must hope that there are limits to the willingness and ability of judges to avert their gaze. Otherwise, we are paying everyone in the system to look the other way when trouble comes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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property rights too much government

Zoned Out

zoning, regulations,

There are ways of cultivating community standards without resorting to zoning and similar regulatory regimens by state and local governments. They have been studied, written about, and they can be found here and there around the country, though most famously in Houston, Texas.

But zoning’s the norm in urban and suburban communities.

Ask Marietta Grundlehner.

She had been running an online clothing boutique from her home in Fairfax County, Virginia, and has been forced to shut it down.

Well, a court has ruled that she must remove all her inventory from her home. You can have a home business in Fairfax, but not inventory of goods for sale.

Ms. Grundlehner had been earning, she said, about $30,000 a year as a “LulaRoe Fashion Retailer” in an industry billed by its online organizer as “social retail.” The ecommerce hub, lularoe.com, makes an enticing pitch for its business model: “Find your joy and fulfillment by creating a positive impact in your community.”

But it was a neighbor who turned her in and sicced the local government on her.

That Fairfax resident sure did not think she was having a “positive impact” in their community.

Grundlehner hopes for a regulatory change to save her business, but Christian Britschgi of Reason has a word for that battle: “uphill.”

Still, online businesses are on the ascendency. Too many run afoul of zoning laws. And online entrepreneurship being the wave of the future, local governments might want to forget their old gentrification utopianism and meet the real world, the place where people actually live. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment property rights U.S. Constitution

Injustice Blocked

asset forfeiture, theft, police, corruption,

Civil asset forfeiture is one of those government practices that good people, when informed of it, often express, at first, incredulity. How can something like that exist in these United States?!?

Good question.

One reason seems to be that very incredulity. Normal Americans trust their government not to be evil. When shown that it regularly engages in actual highway robbery, then denial — ‘this cannot be happening.’

But it is.

Another reason it exists? It is so profitable. 

For those in government, anyway. They get to fill their department coffers without having to ask for tax hikes. They — and by ‘they’ I mean ‘the police’ and government attorneys at state and local levels — just take the wealth. 

Indeed, police routinely “keep whatever they can grab off anybody they arrest, claiming it’s all proceeds or property connected to criminal activities,” writes Scott Shackford at Reason, “and using it to line their own pockets. This incentivizes police to look for people who have assets that can be seized.” 

In South Carolina, Shackford reports, police agencies “across the state had seized more than $17 million in assets across three years. In one-fifth of the cases, nobody was charged or even arrested for a crime.”

Fortunately, there is good news. “Circuit Judge Steven H. John has ruled that the South Carolina’s civil asset forfeiture regulations violate the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights of the citizens.” 

Unfortunately, the fight against this evil practice is far from over. 

But maybe the judge’s ruling will inspire citizens to petition their government and place politicians’ greed into check.

And might not this judge inspire other judges around the country?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment Popular property rights

Of Loot and Leverage

civil asset forfeiture, police, corruption, theft

Without a special kicker, why should police bother to do their jobs?  

The subject is civil asset forfeiture. This legal procedure makes it easy to take property from criminals. For the War on Drugs, civil forfeiture was so loosened as to allow police to take property from anyone . . . without due process.

No wonder citizens in a number of states have demanded limits upon the practice. 

But since police departments get to keep the loot they “interdict” — spending it on better cars, weapons, office furniture, plush employee lounges, drug-sniffing dogs — law enforcement personnel aren’t exactly always on board with citizens’ concerns.

Jarrod Bruder, South Carolina Sheriff’s Association executive director, defends the sorry practice, as quoted by Greenville News. He asks what, sans civil forfeiture’s profit motive, could be a cop’s “incentive to go out and make a special effort?” 

Dollars to donuts, this will not play well with those who distrust the police already. 

And note the biggest incentive police face: to take property away from innocent people. Easier pickin’s. No surprise, then, that in “19 percent of cases, there is no criminal arrest.”*

Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) has suggested that President Trump take the confiscated billions from the accounts of drug kingpin El Chapo to “build the Wall.”

Genius? 

Regardless, this mere suggestion could add incentives for pro-Wall Republicans to go soft on civil asset forfeiture.

There is no point in being secure within our borders if we are not secure within our homes and wallets and cars and . . . any other place jeopardized by this police-state practice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

*Blacks represent 71 percent of cases, while only 28 percent of the state population.

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general freedom property rights

And So It Begins

Hlengiwe Mkhaliphi

“Your time is up, white people,” South African politician Hlengiwe Mkhaliphi offered.

This woman, who belongs to the Economic Freedom Fighters, a “far left” political party, is defending something Frédéric Bastiat would have dubbed the very worst kind of “legal plunder”: in this case, a land grab from white farmers to give to (some) blacks, without compensation.

“White South Africans could be forced to give up their own homes from next year as the nation’s government steamrolls through plans for land expropriation,” Zoie O’Brien reports for Britain’s Daily Mail. Why? Well, “over claims ‘Africa’s original sin’ must be reversed.”

There will be no reversal, of course. Not of “Africa’s original sin,” which, I dare suggest, mischaracterizes the problems of South Africa.

And yes, I know, it is complicated, since “many in the nation see the move as retribution.” For past white supremacist racial policies.

But justice simply cannot be two wrongs. For what is happening in South Africa is the gearing up for a mass crime. 

They call it “land reform,” of course. Lots of tragedies begin that way. Ask the people of the country formerly called Rhodesia. 

I’ve referred to South Africa’s gross dysfunction before. There appears to be an instinctive media downplaying of this matter, largely because of past racism and the “white people bad” mentality now too common.

Your time is up, white people. Racism. Sure. (No point in just calling it “reverse racism.”) A crime against the owners of property. The wrong way to address problems, surely.

And ominous, for rarely does an enormity like this stop just there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Hlengiwe Mkhaliphi

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crime and punishment general freedom judiciary property rights

Property Rights vs. Absentee Frogs

frog, Supreme Court, property

When an assault on individual rights achieves a certain depth of irrationality, the Supreme Court is capable of common sense. Even unanimous common sense.

The 8-0 ruling in Weyerhaeuser v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pertains to the desire of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate over 1500 acres of Louisiana land a “critical habitat” of the dusky gopher frog. The designation means that owners may not develop the land that they own in even the simplest ways without consulting with/begging permission from bureaucrats.

If a property owner has an actual right to his own property, the government cannot properly commandeer even one square inch of it to appease Lithobates sevosus. Give the creature a YouTube video and leave it at that.

But sevosus doesn’t even inhabit the so-called “critical habitat.”

The frog is not on the property!

This fact enabled Chief Justice John Roberts (not always clear on the meaning of words) the chance to emphasize that words have meaning. “According to the ordinary understanding of how adjectives work, ‘critical habitat’ must also be ‘habitat,’” Roberts clarified. “Only the ‘habitat’ of the endangered species is eligible for designation as critical habitat.”

Concurring, pundit George Will says that the decision represents “a recuperative moment for the court” and delivers “a chastisement of the administrative state, the government’s fourth branch, which is one too many.”

Is this ruling as thoroughgoing as it should be? No. Nevertheless, the decision is surely a victory for minimal common sense. Of which we could use more.

And more, also, of maximal common sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Photo credit: US Department of Agriculture

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folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture property rights too much government

Big Government Apologetics

fragile, socialism

Journalists play different roles.

Too few report. Too many engage in elaborate apologetics for favored causes.

Like big government.

Take this headline: “Venezuela’s Crisis Is Rooted In Oil Prices — and Authoritarianism.”

Guess: reporting, or bending over backwards to save socialism?

The article’s summary of the decline and fall of Venezuela is accurate insofar as it indicates assaults on liberty, including nationalizations and monetary inflation. But neither “oil prices” nor dependence on oil spawned Venezuela’s crisis.

Every industry, city and nation will experience unfavorable markets, now and then. But what’s fundamental is their “antifragility.” And, news to journalists: socialist societies are fragile in ways that freer societies are not.

Suppose Venezuela had had a free market when oil prices dropped so precipitously. People would then have shifted, however grumpily, into enterprises now more profitable than drilling for and distributing oil.

It is no blunder to specialize, to exploit comparative advantages in knowledge, skills or resources, and to engage in local, regional or international trade. It’s fine even if an economy’s production and exports ends up being dominated by just one good. What matters is whether people are free or burdened by government controls. If the latter, how hard does government make it to cope with changing circumstances?

Unhampered market prices supply the information and incentives needed to adapt to all kinds of changes. But if an economy is chronically distorted and calcified by government controls, it becomes much harder to adapt . . . and much harder to survive.

Today’s journalists routinely adapt facts to story, rather than adjust stories to reality. Guys, give up the ideological apologetics. Go back to reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment moral hazard property rights U.S. Constitution

Forfeiting Common Sense

civil, asset, forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, cash, grocery bag, Whole Foods, theft, police, corruption

Is it okay to steal if you can get away with it?

A full answer would require a treatise. But most of us common-sensibly understand that evil does not magically become good when perpetrators are not stopped or punished. Thrasymachus was wrong to contend, in Plato’s Republic, that justice is merely the “interest of the stronger.”

When it comes to crimes like bank robberies, muggings and car jackings, we have no doubts about this. In such blatant cases, we suffer nothing like the legitimate confusion to which we may be prone regarding the exact border between adjacent parcels of land or the niceties of intellectual property law.

Well, somebody tell the New Hampshire state police.

Some of them apparently believe it’s okay to steal if you can evade laws against the stealing.

New Hampshire’s recent reform of civil forfeiture laws requires criminal conviction of a person before there can be any forfeiture of his property. But a loophole enabled officers to grab $46,000 of Edward Phipps’s money — from his car, stopped on the road — even though he was never accused of a crime. 

How?

It seems that if state cops collaborate with the feds, safeguards established to prevent such abuse can be evaded.

To retrieve even a little of his money ($7,000), Mr. Phipps was forced to relinquish all claim to the balance ($39,000). Even if lawmakers close the loophole, as they should, the robber-cops will probably get away with this particular larceny. 

They shouldn’t.

That’s injustice, not common sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Photo Credit: N.H. State Police