In 2024, California voters will decide whether to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which prohibits municipalities from imposing rent control on properties built after 1995. Regardless of the outcome of the election, this is just another in a long string of examples that California is dominated by mob rule. In California, nearly every activity…
In late July, two professors issued a call for dictatorship. In an open letter to President Biden, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet and San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin urged the President to restrain MAGA [Supreme Court] justices immediately by announcing that if and when they issue rulings that are based on gravely…
Defenders of government schools like to claim that vouchers, educational savings plans, and similar programs give “public money” to parents for private schooling. Indeed, a recent headline states, “More states using taxpayer dollars to help families pay for private school.” This claim is effective only if one drops context. There is no such thing as…
I began this series by referring to Ayn Rand’s claim that without property rights, no other rights are possible. I was initially skeptical of that claim, and that is what led to an intense study of philosophy, history, and economics. My goal was to determine if Rand’s claim was indeed true. It is. A few…
This post is the seventh in a series. While I have long understood the importance of property rights, my understanding has reached a much deeper level over the past decade. During that time, I have written nearly one-thousand blog posts, OpEd articles, and policy papers. I have written three books and conducted dozens of workshops…
This post is the sixth in a series. In the early 1990s, I wrote a paper titled “Government Without Taxation.” In the paper, I examined various ways to finance government without coercive taxation. At the time, I thought that this would be a good topic for a book and made several futile attempts to write…
This post is the fifth in a series. In the past two posts, I have summarized my experiences while fighting zoning in two different cities—Houston, and Hobbs, New Mexico. I learned many things from those efforts. Perhaps the most important lesson was that when clear moral distinctions are made between opposing views, the more rational…
This post is the fourth in a series. About twelve years after zoning was defeated in Houston, I was contacted by two businessmen in Hobbs, New Mexico. The city council was considering a zoning ordinance, and they wanted me to help defeat the proposal. They had found the pamphlet that my friend and I had…
This post is the third in a series. In early January 1990 (I think it was January 1) the local newspaper carried a story that a Houston City Councilman was going to introduce a zoning ordinance. A friend called me that day and suggested that we fight the ordinance. I immediately agreed. Over the next…
This post is the second in a series. Before I could determine if Ayn Rand was correct in claiming that “without property rights, no other rights are possible,” I had to understand what property rights really means. Sure, I could recite the definition: “The right to property means the freedom to produce, use, and trade…
Nearly forty years ago I read Ayn Rand’s essay “Man’s Rights,” for the first time. I was new to Rand’s writing, and indeed free market thought in general. Rand’s claim that, “Without property rights, no other rights are possible,” struck me as a gross exaggeration. I became determined to discover whether that claim was true….
In opinion piece Andrew P. Napolitano presents us with the false alternative of dictatorship or dictatorship: One is not truly free if one cannot leave the government. This applies to people as well as to political subdivisions. The forced retention of people or geographical units under the government’s monopolistic jurisdiction is totalitarian. Without the threat…