Americans have no property rights!

The right to own and use property is a foundational right—many other rights and privileges flow directly from this basic right. In theory, the US Constitution protects private property (see, e.g. Amendments 4 and 5), but years of chipping away and outright end-runs on the Constitution have yielded the following:

• Property may be taken for ‘public use’ which includes transferring it to someone who promised to pay more property tax
• Property may be taken for ‘public’ use via trumped-up ‘blight’ declarations to change the character of a neighborhood
• Property may be taken via ‘forfeiture’ by any government entity if it is alleged to be in some way related to a crime and the original owner must prove that it is not related to a crime
• Property may be taken by zoning regulations which make it unfit for the purpose it is currently being used for or intended to be used for
• Property may be taken by zoning regulations which render the property effectively worthless
• Property may be seized for failure to pay taxes, not just on the property, but any taxes at all
• Property may be so heavily regulated that it loses its value and thus is worthless
• Use of firearms (or other means) to defend your property are highly limited and more often than not prohibited

All of the above are ‘takings’ whereby the government appropriates the property (or the value of the property) for public use without compensation. In fact, things are little different than feudal times when individuals were required to pay rents to the Lord for land. They could be arbitrarily kicked off the land, have their rents raised or otherwise be denied use of the land at the whim of the Lord. There is no real difference between property taxes and feudal rents, although there is the facade of elections covering the taxes.

And this applies to all property that you ‘own’—land, goods, currency, bank accounts, etc. Any and all of them can be seized through civil forfeiture with little more than the flimsiest of evidence. Try carrying large amounts of cash anywhere. If you ever get stopped by the police, it will likely be seized and you will have to fight lengthy court battles to try to get it back. Don’t hold your breath, though, since the authorities play games of transferring these seized assets to other government entities causing you to have to jump through even more hoops. All to attempt to prove that the property was not related to a crime in any way, something that is difficult to do even in the best of circumstances. Remember, the government has the property based solely on a claim and has no burden of proof.

What’s the solution here? There are several things that should be done to restore property rights:

• End all civil forfeiture immediately. If the property is the gain from a crime, handle it in criminal court.
• Reduce property taxes dramatically, and base them on revenue generated by the property, not the theoretical value were it sold. This requires reforming the financing of public services as well (often paid for by property taxes).
• Reduce regulation and eliminate zoning, handing issues of property use as torts if they interfere with another person’s property
• Require all regulations that are imposed to assess the economic impact on property and pay the owner for the reduction in value caused by the regulation
• Restrict ‘eminent domain’ seizure of land to very specific public use, and prohibit transfer of private property from one owner to another

Other abuses of property rights, such as infinite extensions on copyright, government ‘ownership’ of huge tracts of land (and denying public access to it) and prohibitions on owning certain types of goods need to be dealt with as well (and I’ll cover them in the future), but the above is a good start.

As John Locke (no, not the Lost character, the ‘real’ John Locke) said:

The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.

And yet, our society does exactly the opposite—interferes with the preservation of property at every turn, supposedly in the name of the ‘common’ good. How quickly people forget the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and what happens when property is public and not private.

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