Property Rights

This post has been updated to reflect George Sheetz’s April 12 victory at the Supreme Court. Picture this: You’re a 65-year-old retiree who bought a small parcel of land in El Dorado County, California. In your career you worked your way up from $5-an-hour laborer to head of your own engineering contracting company. Your plans … ...

Rent control is a bad housing policy that won’t go away. Unfortunately, this term, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review not one, not two, but three cases that challenged New York City’s 2019 iteration of the bad housing policy, euphemistically labeled “rent stabilization.” But thanks to Justice Clarence Thomas, the pr ...

Everywhere we turn these days we see stories of individuals taking up residence in properties they don’t own. It’s called “squatting,” but it’s nothing more than trespassing.  This explainer clarifies why squatting is immoral and illegal, why it’s growing, and how to stop it.  What is squatting? “Squattin ...

Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an article about one of California’s longest-running residential building projects —17 years and counting to complete 49 “affordable” housing units that cost $32.4 million to build, not to mention the land the county gave to the developer. The project, initiated in 2007, is listed as ...

States across the nation are responding to the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision last summer in Tyler v. Hennepin County, in which the Court held that home equity theft—when the government takes more than is owed when collecting a property tax debt—is unconstitutional. But some states have proposed reforms that would require property own ...

This month marks 80 years since F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was originally published in Britain. (An American edition was published six months afterward.) The book has since been translated into 20 languages and sold several million copies, making it not only Hayek’s most notable work, but also one of the foremost treatises ̷ ...

Last week, a judge ruled that parents Josh Sabey and Sarah Perkins’ lawsuit could move forward against government officials who stole their children from their home without a court order in the middle of the night. The basis for this action? A single x-ray of their sick infant showed an old, healing rib injury. Without … ...

“Where once government was closely constrained to increase the freedom of individuals, now property ownership is closely constrained to increase the power of government. Where once government was a necessary evil because it protected private property, now private property is a necessary evil because it funds government programs.” 1San R ...

The Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era were fraught with tumult as the Southern states struggled with economic devastation and ever-mounting racial tensions. With the end of the Civil War came the end of slavery and a burgeoning hope for racial equality. The newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment declared what the laws of nature had long since ...