Obama Feasts on Ignorance to Devour Property
Rights By John Anthony, 6/23/16
President Obama is successfully
executing the most dangerous seizure of individual choice in our
history because Americans are growing blind to the bond between property rights
and human rights.
While
farm owners surrender their land development rights to
governments, federal agencies relocate affordable housing next to million
dollar homes, and declare entire neighborhoods discriminatory.
Every one of these acts, according
to Washington State Justice Richard Saunders, “annihilates” the value of the
property and “renders ownership barren.”
But land value is the beginning. By
controlling their land, these governments now control the property owners’
behavior. Here is an example…
Imagine
you see your ‘dream’ car in a dealership, walk in, pay cash and emerge with the
gleaming new automobile and title. You are excited until the salesperson
warns, “A federal rule now requires your car be equipped with a GPS system
to stop the engine once you reach 35 miles each day.” “This
protects the environment, and helps with climate change.” He goes on,
“There is no problem, because on Sundays you can drive up to 350
miles!”
Having no
choice, you reluctantly agree. While you
clearly own the car in the story, the government clearly controls it.
However, they control more than your car. A federal agency can now manage
when and how often you visit your grandchildren 80 miles away, where you shop
for groceries, how far you travel to work and school, and even the method of
transportation you use.
By controlling your property, the
government controls your behavior and you begin the descent into
slavery. That is what Ayn Rand meant when she said, “Without property
rights, there are no human rights.”
By seizing property rights, and
therefore human rights, governments expand their power. That is why
statists like President Obama have a long history of attacking the
importance of personal property rights. The more the government convinces
people their rights are “flexible,” the easier it is to steal them.
In the book, Agency
Tyranny, How HUD is Taking Your Property Rights, I quote political historian David Upham who
writes…
“Progressives
in the twentieth century have in large part aimed at turning the American
people away from their traditional attachment to property rights.”
President Franklin Roosevelt swore
to Americans that our Founders believed more in socialist programs like his New
Deal than in rigid property ownership. He claimed the New Deal was a
“fulfillment of old and tested American ideals.”
While campaigning, FDR proclaimed
that Thomas Jefferson only held the right of personal opinions as “inviolable”
but that all other property rights “should be modified as times and
circumstances required.”
Of course, none of this is true.
James Madison belies FDR’s remarks in his essay on Property. “In its larger and juster meaning it
[property] embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a
right…Government is instituted to protect property of every sort,” the Father
of the Constitution wrote.
Leftists have gone to bizarre
extremes to destroy the importance of property rights.
In “A People’s History of the United
States,” historian Howard Zinn blames private property for women’s oppression.
“Societies
based on private property and competition, in which monogamous families became
practical units for work and socialization, found it especially useful to
establish this special status of women, something akin to a house slave in the
matter of intimacy and oppression, and yet requiring, because of that intimacy,
and long-term connection with children, a special patronization, which on
occasion, especially in the face of a show of strength, could slip over into
treatment as an equal. An oppression so private would turn out hard to uproot.”
According to the late Zinn, private
property is so evil; it turns women into “house slave[s]”! Zinn’s tortured
reasoning has had an immense impact on young Americans’ thinking. Since
its 1980 debut, the book has been a staple in our high schools and sold over 1
million copies. Actor Matt Damon even quoted from “A People’s History” in
his hit movie, “Good Will Hunting.”
Never mind that Zinn, a proven
Communist, states in the book’s opening page, “Objectivity is impossible, and
it is also undesirable.” To Zinn, what was “desirable” was the devaluing of
free markets and private property.
Generations of Zinn-like teachings
have cultivated minds susceptible to Obama’s federal greed. Agencies like
HUD, are the govenrments preferred means of acquisition.
·
In 2015, even though the voters of
Rockford, IL refused a builder’s proposal to build low-income homes out of
crime concerns, the federal government overruled the property owners.
HUD forced the elected officials of
Dubuque, IA to issue Section 8 housing vouchers to Chicago, IL residents over
175 miles away, essentially annexing the community into a HUD-defined Chicago
region.
·
In June 2016, the President convened
a meeting of HUD, the Department of Education and the Department of
Transportation to plan methods to relocate low-income families into affluent
schools and neighborhoods where they often have no desire to live, to
attain “economic diversity.”
Even though moves like this
commandeer property rights and socially engineer communities into a homogenized
federal scheme, choruses of people support the President’s actions. As long as
misinformed Americans provide cover for government expansionists, the programs
will advance, while freedoms shrivel.
·
In May 2016, HUD Secretary Julian
Castro announced that suburban landlords will face legal action for refusing to
accept Section 8 vouchers from tenants with criminal records.
·
A proposed plan will shuffle
low-income families like chess pawns to wealthier neighborhoods. If the poor
refuse to move, HUD promises to cut their current voucher payments.
As even HUD residents are learning,
uncontrolled government dispenses equal opportunity abuse.
If freedom holds any value, we must
educate our neighbors to the link between property and human rights, and the
dangers of a government that can peel off either on a whim.
http://sustainablefreedomlab.org/2016/06/23/obama-feasts-on-ignorance-to-devour-property-rights/
No comments:
Post a Comment