My Gazette: Squatters Rights

By Rich Kozlovich

This will be updated regularly to used as source articles.  I would like to point out in some jurisdictions the legitimate property owner would be put in jail for some regarding the idea presented in this next article.  You wonder at the insanity of these laws, but since the government no longer believes is the sanctity of personal property, why would you expect them to pass insane "squatter rights" laws.  If the nations various governments think this is such a good idea, let them squat on government property.  Then we'll see changes.  

Nightmare: Squatters take over home, and OWNER gets arrested! Changed locks while 'tenant' was away from residence - By Bob Unruh March 19, 2024 -In the topsy-turvy America today, where conservatives are jailed and liberals let off, where judges turn violent criminals loose and the Deep State's political enemies are behind bars, where illegal aliens have rights and property owners don't, this scenario probably shouldn't surprise: It is a case of squatters taking over a privately owned home and the owner getting arrested...............

Outsquatting the Squatters- Robyn Dolgin - Landlords are now beating squatters at their own game. They are learning how to turn the tables by squatting on the squatters. ........His amateur production of outwitting the mother-daughter grifter team offered a glimpse of what could be accomplished when the injured party (i.e. landlord) refuses to be handcuffed by an inept and morally bankrupt judicial system. He is a handyman by trade and used to getting the job done himself............

And squatters certainly know their "rights." Many of them refuse to give an inch initially because they realize if they can hang on for 30 days or longer, they enter a new tier of protection for their illegal behavior in the bluest of blue states. Who would have thought it possible that the longer you engage in violating the law the more protection you’ll receive under the law in “progressive” states? Shelton is teaching landlords an invaluable lesson as he gains more and more notoriety on YouTube and appears in a multitude of media interviews. He has pointed out that as a tenant he has more rights than a landlord............

Shelton is not above eating the squatters’ food, occupying their favorite spot for television watching, or blasting loud music. Can he do that? Apparently, he’s doing it routinely and he has yet to get arrested. After all, he’s a tenant: And just like squatters, he, too, has rights. The advice Shelton gives landlords may not match the instructions offered by high-priced law firms (no other kind), but his tactics have proven effective for a fraction of the cost.....Horror stories abound over serial squatters turning homes into strip clubs and hosting all-night parties. Those scenarios are only matched by squatters who have developed a taste for the high life and move into posh neighborhoods. Sang Kim, a case in point, made headlines as a “serial squatter” who refused to move out of a $2 million Seattle property.................

Nightmare: Squatters take over home, and OWNER gets arrested! Changed locks while 'tenant' was away from residence -By Bob Unruh March 19, 2024 -In the topsy-turvy America today, where conservatives are jailed and liberals let off, where judges turn violent criminals loose and the Deep State's political enemies are behind bars, where illegal aliens have rights and property owners don't, this scenario probably shouldn't surprise: It is a case of squatters taking over a privately owned home and the owner getting arrested.  ..........

Organized Theft in the Name of Government - By Tom Deweese March 6, 2024 - Today’s drive to eliminate free enterprise, individuality, and private property will not lead to an environmental paradise; rather, it will result in shattered American dreams Most Americans today tend to think of private property simply as a home – the place where the family resides, stores their belongings, and finds shelter and safety from the elements. It’s where you live. It’s yours because you pay the mortgage and the taxes. Most people don’t give property ownership much more thought than that.............

Police: Squatters Arrested After NYC Woman’s Body Found Stuffed in Duffel Bag - Amy Furr 23 Mar 2024 - Two people whom authorities say are linked to the brutal killing of a woman in New York City were arrested by U.S. Marshals on Friday in York, Pennsylvania, regarding charges of receiving stolen property. The individuals in the case were identified as Halley Tejada, 19, and Kensly Alston, 18, WGAL reported. “The charges are related to the crash of a stolen vehicle in Lower Paxton Township, Dauphin County, on March 13,” the outlet said............Authorities believe the squatters beat Vitels to death on March 12 upon returning from a trip to Spain, according to the New York Post.............

Good deed gone bad: Squatter sues Atlanta property owner who allowed temporary free stays  - By Mary Smith March 24, 2024 -An Atlanta property owner is frustrated after he says people have been living on his land without permission for years. David Morris, who now lives in California, says squatters have been living on his southeast Atlanta property since the pandemic, and it's been quite an ordeal getting them to leave........."It's frustrating that I'm having to spend so much money. I spent $10,000 on cleaning up garbage from vagrants," Morris told FOX 5............

Beware of Squatters - Betsy McCaughey Mar 27, 2024 - If you own a home and don't want to lose it, keep reading. Homeowners who go on vacation or a business trip, even for just a week, are returning to find their house overtaken by trespassers who fraudulently claim a right to be there. It's happening to tens of thousands of homeowners from New York City to Atlanta and Los Angeles.   When owners call the police, they're told police can't help. It's a civil matter, and they have to file an eviction lawsuit, which can drag on for months or years because housing courts are backlogged. Meanwhile owners are out on the street while squatters are living free, destroying houses and even selling off owners' belongings.  If you found a stranger sitting in your car and called the police, they would immediately ask to see the registration and decide who owns it, explains Georgetown law professor Jonathan Turley. They wouldn't let the thief drive off. But the law is stacked against homeowners.....

DeSantis Signs Property Rights Bill in Florida That Ends ‘Squatting Scam’ By Debra Heine March 27, 2024 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation into law Wednesday that ends squatters’ rights in the Sunshine State, stating that “squatting” is a scam that violates private property rights. After alarming stories about squatters commandeering homes and depriving the owners of their property rights made nationwide news in recent weeks, DeSantis took action.  “We are in the state of Florida are ending this squatters scam once and for all. And momentarily I’ll be signing HB 621, which will give the homeowner the ability to quickly and legally remove a squatter from a property and which will increase criminal penalties for squatting,” DeSantis said during a press conference on the signing at the Orange County State Attorney’s Office.......

Porsche-Driving NY Squatters Request to Become ‘Heirs’ to Property, Terrorize Neighbors By Olivia Rondeau April 6, 2024 -  A couple of brazen New York squatters are asking to be declared “heirs” to the abandoned property they have been living in after being accused of tricking a judge to get the rights to the home and terrorizing their neighbors. Denton Gayle, 29, and Margaret Grover, 19, have been staying at the nearly $900,000 Long Island home with their baby boy and pitbull for several months, the New York Post reported. The family — which has a Porsche parked in the driveway — was kicked out of the home in October 2023 after a concerned citizen called 911 to report that they had their son living in squalor, with no heat, electricity, or working bathrooms. ......The judge screwed up, and now we have to deal with the consequences,” another concerned resident told the outlet. “The Town of North Hempstead has been totally useless.”............

John Fetterman Latest Remarks on Squatters Rights and Crime Won't Please Leftists - Matt Vespa April 07, 2024 - I didn’t have much hope that Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) would be a good senator; he’s a Democrat. Truth be told, it would seem miraculous if he could finish one term. The man suffered a near-fatal stroke during the 2022 election, and the impact on his cognitive abilities was profound on the stump. He was hospitalized shortly after his swearing-in, but since that stay—Mr. Fetterman has been a pleasant surprise. That’s not to say I’d ever vote for him, but he’s a Democrat who is pro-Israel, anti-woke and finds his party’s position on public safety to be a disgrace ............. “Squatters have no rights,” Fetterman said, adding that the issue was one he often dealt with when he was mayor of working-class Braddock, Pa. “How can you even pretend that this is anything other than you’re just breaking the law?” .............. 

Illegals Encouraged to Take Advantage of Squatter ‘Rights’ Laws -  April 5, 2024 by Joseph Klein 36 Comments - The infringement of Americans’ property rights spins out of control.   A Venezuelan illegal immigrant named Leonel Moreno went viral on TikTok recently with a message to other illegal immigrants that squatting in owners’ homes is an easy thing to do in the United States. “I have thought about invading a house in the United States,” he said in a TikTok video. “I found out that there is a law that says that if a house is not inhabited, we can seize it.” He claimed to have “African friends” who have “already taken about seven homes.” Moreno was one of millions of illegal immigrants apprehended and released on Biden’s watch. Fortunately, Moreno’s TikTok antics put a spotlight on him, leading to his arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials and his federal detention. Whether the Biden administration releases him again remains to be seen. But whatever happens to Moreno himself, his message to would-be squatters rings true. Squatters are claiming the right under permissive laws to remain in homes that do not belong to them and to keep out the rightful owners............

 

Ohio County Stands Up to Biden's Attack on Private Property Rights

Leah Barkoukis Aug 06, 2021

Franklin County, Ohio, is taking a stand against President Biden’s recent directive for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue a 60-day eviction moratorium extension. In a statement released on Thursday, Franklin County Municipal Court Administrative and Presiding Judge Ted Barrows said the county will not comply, citing an appeals court ruling last month. On July 23, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati found the CDC didn’t have the authority to impose the nationwide moratorium.

Based on that ruling, the Franklin County court release said, courts in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan are no longer bound by the latest moratorium the CDC imposed on Tuesday.

Franklin County is not alone on this issue. Wednesday, Toledo Housing Court Judge Joseph Howe told the Toledo Blade that his court would abide by the appeals court decision and not honor the moratorium, either.

On Thursday, the Hamilton County Municipal Court followed suit, with judges voting to not comply with the moratorium. (The Columbus Dispatch)

Judge Barrows made clear to the Columbus Dispatch, however, that tenants still have the same rights they did before the pandemic. Not only is there a process that must be followed, there is also pandemic aid still available for individuals struggling to pay rent..............Barrows went on to dismiss the media hype over the issue as "apocryphal."...........You're hearing that from advocates who have a certain point of view. .........To Read More......

 

Supreme Court Grants Rare Win For Economic Freedom

Ethan Yang  – July 1, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

Economic and civil liberties should not be seen as two ideals to be weighed separately but as one set of inalienable rights that are inherent to our humanity. What is economic prosperity worth if you can’t speak your mind? What value is there to having civil protections if everything else in your life is regulated into despair? Oftentimes civil and economic freedom are intertwined in such intimate ways that there really is no difference. Sadly, today economic rights have taken a second class status under the current judicial status quo, which is why policies that infringe on things like free speech receive plenty of scrutiny yet arbitrary regulations on business pass with almost no oversight. 

This is why a recent Supreme Court decision, Cedar Point Nursery v Hassid, is such an important win for those concerned with economic freedom, specifically property rights. The case was decided on June 23, 2021, and was split 6-3 on “expected ideological lines.” Although there was likely much nuance in the thinking of the various justices, the win is a much-welcomed departure from the Progressive status quo of deference to the will of the state. The case itself concerned an “access regulation” in California that allowed labor unions to enter a private property in this case, Cedar Point Nursery, provided that they dispense notice to the Agricultural Relations Board. After doing so, the owner of the property is mandated to allow access without contestation. Such a policy seems to have been clearly put in place at the behest of politically influential labor unions and to the expense of private citizens. 

A Rare But Important Victory

Ilya Shapiro and Sam Spiegleman from the Cato Institute weigh in on the matter by explaining:

Cedar Point will go down as a big and clean win for property rights. California’s law is no mere labor regulation: it grants a right to be on the owners’ land three hours per day for 120 days per year. Ending it respects the constitutional rights of both the property owners and union officials, who lose only the ability to trespass for a third of the year.

The Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause provides, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Here, even though the state didn’t seize any property outright, the Supreme Court has long recognized that if a regulation “goes too far,” it’s functionally equivalent to the use of eminent domain.

The Court’s recognition here that state-sanctioned trespasses, even if not permanent and continuous, are compensable takings is a major victory for property‐​rights advocates who have toiled for decades to expand the universe of per se takings beyond the narrow scope of permanent physical invasions or total‐​value‐​loss regulations.

In particular, Cato’s Amicus Brief on the matter explains three basic points on why California’s labor regulation was unconstitutional and curtailed property rights, thus requiring at minimum, just compensation. 

The first being that allowing labor unions to simply enter private property with a permission slip from the government violated the right to exclude. If you cannot exclude people from your property, it has ceased to be private property. The fact that the government has given itself the power to grant that decision makes the use of such powers a per se taking of private property. 

The second argument is that the state of California has clearly not implemented the access regulation to make businesses safer, nor does the regulation confer reciprocal advantages, which would also make it a per se taking. Allowing labor unions to forcefully enter a private business and stir up commotion is by no means a necessity for safety nor is that benefiting the community as a whole.

The third point is that the state does not have the justification to use its police power because not allowing union trespassing on private land does not in any sense of the imagination pose a safety risk. 

For decades, the state and a deferential court system have allowed the gradual unraveling of property rights to the will of the regulatory state. This has justified the aforementioned relegation of economic freedoms and autonomy to second-class status, with the government being able to intervene in economic life provided that it can merely find a rational basis. In the case of Cedar Point Nursery, California’s law essentially allowed property rights to be confiscated by the state for union access, three hours a day, 120 days a year, without just compensation. This was justified as being a “labor regulation” and “necessary for public safety”.

The Supreme Court finally handed a rare, but hopefully, consequential victory to those who respect the institution of property rights. In this case, the Court ended what was an incoherent charade to skirt around the 5th Amendment’s Takings Clause. A charade that attempted to call a blatant appropriation of private property to bolster the power of unions at the expense of property owners an exercise in public safety. 

The Importance of Strong Property Rights

Our entire civilization is built on the foundation of private property. Such an institution not only creates strong economic incentive structures that lead to good practical outcomes but also has an important moral foundation. National Affairs recounts the rhetoric surrounding the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by writing:

Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, the leading champion of the legislation in the Senate, explained that the “first section of the bill defines what I understand to be civil rights: the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue and be sued, and to give evidence, to inherit, purchase, sell, lease, hold, and convey real and personal property.”… As a member of the House from Ohio argued, “It is idle to say that a citizen shall have the right to life, yet to deny him the right to labor, whereby alone he can live. It is a mockery to say that a citizen may have a right to live, and yet deny him the right to make a contract to secure the privilege and reward of labor.

The right to private property is the right to the products of your own labor. The right to your own labor and its products is the right to your body. Professor Emeritus at Vanderbilt University, James W. Ely, writes:

(T)here are few examples of free societies that do not respect the rights of property owners. One could persuasively maintain that without guarantee of property rights the enjoyment of other individual liberties, such as freedom of speech, would be meaningless. Put simply, the absence of a system of private property renders self-government unlikely. As Justice Joseph Story explained in 1829: “That government can scarcely be called free, where the rights of property are left solely dependent upon the will of a legislative body.

For much of American history, this admiration and recognition of property rights remained a cornerstone of political as well as legal thought. However, much with everything concerning the size and scale of American government, this drastically changed during the 20th century, most notably during the Progressive Era. Ely writes:

Like the Progressives, the New Dealers were impatient with constitutional restraints on governmental power. They quite openly set out to revise constitutional law and reduce private economic rights. Despite some initial judicial resistance, the New Dealers were remarkably successful in achieving their goals and fundamentally altering the legal landscape. Modern constitutional law bears only a faint resemblance to the original constitutional design.

Ely concludes by noting that although many of the judicial precedents have been unwound, the Progressive Era’s legacy on property rights is still salient. The new battle over the soul of constitutional interpretation has only begun and the end result is yet to be seen.

Key Takeaways

Cedar Point was a rare, well deserved, and sorely needed victory for private property rights, a once sacred institution that has all been desecrated over the years. In this case, the Supreme Court affirmed the right of individuals and dealt a blow to cronyist labor unions and their enablers in the government. The Court’s decision marks a step in the right direction towards a judicial regime that enforces the Constitution and does not view it as simply a welcome mat for the ambitions of state actors. Although it is only one decision, it should send a clear signal that in this country, under this constitution, the inalienable rights of individuals shall be protected from the mob as well as the Leviathan.

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Ethan Yang

Ethan Yang is an Adjunct Research Fellow at AIER as well as the host of the AIER Authors Corner Podcast.

He holds a BA in Political Science with a concentration in International Relations with minors in legal studies and formal organizations from Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut. He is currently pursuing a JD from the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.

Ethan also serves as the director of the Mark Twain Center for the Study of Human Freedom at Trinity College and is also involved with Students for Liberty. He has also held research positions at the Cato Institute, the Connecticut State Senate, Cause of Action Institute and other organizations.

Ethan is currently based in Washington D.C and is a recipient of the 13th Annual International Vernon Smith Prize from the European Center of Austrian Economics Foundation. His work has been featured and cited in a variety of outlets from online media to radio broadcast.

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Political Economy vs. Federal Fairy Tales

James Bovard  – March 29, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

Build Back Better” is the motto for President Biden’s ambitious plans to remake much of the American economy and society. On Wednesday in Pittsburgh, Biden will reveal his plans for trillions of dollars of new spending for infrastructure and other projects. His devotees in the national media will whoop up his proposals as the greatest thing since the New Deal, or at least since Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act a couple weeks ago.

Once Biden fires the starting gun, a deluge of experts will descend upon cable news shows to tout the vast benefits of the proposed “investment.” There will be a barrage of econometric formulas that irrefutably prove, via 10 or 15 shaky or squirrely assumptions, that vastly increasing federal spending will multiply prosperity across the land.  

Rather than deferring to mathematical formulas, I prefer old time political economy – i.e., analyses premised on the perfidy of politicians and the imbecility of bureaucracies. As a Washington journalist, I have investigated scores of federal programs that sounded great until they crashed and burned (okay, I did give some of them a push). Historical track records of government agencies are a better lodestar than the latest idealistic buncombe regardless of how many MSNBC hosts swoon. 

 “Washington knows best” is the tacit premise for most of Biden’s initiatives. The Biden administration can trust federal agencies to shamelessly fabricate statistics to vindicate any new program, or at least cover up the initial damage. 

Biden is planning on expanding federal job training programs, a beloved federal panacea dating back to the Kennedy administration. In 2014, President Obama admitted that such programs rely on a “‘train and pray’ approach. We train them and we pray that they can get a job.” To hide its dismal record, the Labor Department “defined down success” by counting trainees as hired simply by confirming they had a job interview, by certifying as permanently employed any trainee who spent one day on a new job, and by claiming victory for teaching teenagers how to make change for a dollar. No wonder programs are notorious for leaving trainees worse off than if they had never signed up. 

Biden is stretching the definition of infrastructure to include new spending for early childhood education, seeking to offer free pre-kindergarten for all three- and four-year-old American children. Will Biden’s speechwriters concoct a label as punchy as President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind (NCLB)?” But stretching government control over more years of childhood will turn out no better than Bush’s biggest domestic fraud. NCLB empowered the U.S. Education Department to punish local schools for not fulfilling arbitrary, often imaginary guidelines for “adequate yearly progress.” Almost half the states responded by “dumbing down” academic standards, lowering passing scores on tests to avoid harsh federal sanctions. Unfortunately, NCLB’s disasters have not deterred politicians from hustling further federal takeovers of schooling. 

As part of its climate change agenda, Biden issued an executive order on January 27 proclaiming “the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands by 2030.” Farmers and other landowners fear the feds may squeeze out private ownership of vast swaths of the nation’s heartland. Is there any reason to expect Biden’s Climate “Brain Trust” to be wiser than Franklin Roosevelt’s original Brain Trust which launched command-and-control farm policies that still vex America?

The sugar program, for instance, relies on import quotas and other interventions to drive U.S. sugar prices to double or triple the world price, costing consumers $3 billion a year. Since 1997, Washington’s sugar policy has zapped more than 120,000 U.S. jobs in food manufacturing. More than 10 jobs have been lost in manufacturing for every remaining sugar grower in the U.S. 

Peanuts take the prize for perpetual policy perversity. When the U.S. peanut program was launched in the 1930s, the federal government gave favored farmers licenses to grow peanuts and outlawed anyone else from entering the business. To maximize its controls, the USDA used aerial photography to determine if farmers planted a few more square feet than they were allotted. In 2002, Congress spent $4 billion to buy out the peanut license owners and end the program. Problem solved, right? Nope – congressmen still needed campaign contributions. In 2014, Congress created a new program that guaranteed payments far above market prices. The cost of peanut subsidies quickly approached a billion dollars a year, nearly equaling the farm value of all the peanuts grown in the U.S. Farmers dumped surplus peanuts on USDA, which dumped them on Haiti, sowing chaos in local markets. But that wasn’t a problem because Haitian peanut farmers can’t vote in U.S. elections (at least not yet).  

Among other pending marvels, Biden is planning to reform the Postal Service, an agency that has almost perfected statistical chicanery. In the 1980s, it boasted of 95% next-day delivery of first-class mail but the official tests measured only when letters moved from one post office to another, not when they were actually delivered. When the target for overnight first-class delivery was slashed to less than 50 miles in 1989, Postmaster General Anthony Frank promised that the new standards would “improve our ability to deliver local mail on time.” Sen. David Pryor (D-AR) groused, “This is like trying to fool the public by cutting the top off the flagpole when the flag is stuck halfway up.” In 2015, the Postal Service effectively eliminated overnight mail delivery even for local mail in much of the nation. With revised standards, “mail was considered on time if it took four to five days to arrive instead of three,” the Washington Post noted. The Postal Service has gotten away with cutbacks because it has a monopoly: it is a federal crime to provide better mail service than the government.

Biden administration policymakers can take solace knowing that federal agencies will shroud their abuses with statistical smokescreens. Transportation Security Administration agents, for instance, are sometimes derided as hopeless knuckleheads (cynics suggest that “TSA” actually stands for “Too Stupid for Arby’s”). Though TSA screeners dismally failed to detect most of the smuggled weapons and fake bombs in undercover tests, TSA in its early years issued triumphal press releases touting the number of knickknacks confiscated at airport checkpoints. TSA chief James Loy bragged that TSA screeners “have identified, intercepted, and therefore kept off aircraft more than 4.8 million dangerous items.” All the fingernail clippers, cigar cutters, frying pans, horseshoes, and small pointy objects TSA seized proved that the feds were protecting airline passengers better than ever. TSA doubled down by spending billions of dollars on Whole Body Scanners to take nude photos of travelers, after which TSA screeners’ failure rate on undercover tests rose to 95%. But presidents and members of Congress have been exempted from most of TSA’s indignities, so this particular federal gropefest continues. 

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx declared in 2015, “Defective agencies, like defective people, need the capacity for self-reflection and to make room for self-improvement.” But bureaucracies don’t learn from mistakes because they don’t pay for their failures. Government intervention is a cornucopia for politicians and bureaucrats regardless of what happens to purported beneficiaries.

Nor is there a detectable learning curve among the likely hallelujah chorus for Biden’s proposals. Philip Tetlock, a University of California research psychologist, noted “a perversely inverse relationship between indicators of good judgment and the qualities the media prizes in pundits.” Washington policy experts are akin to baseball commentators who never consider players’ batting averages and then are perennially shocked at all of the strikeouts. Rather than soiling their pristine minds with Inspector General and Government Accountability Office reports documenting the failure of similar prior programs, media cheerleaders will showcase the latest White House talking points. 

But Biden can still count on economists riding to the rescue with multipliers, right? Alas, if such multipliers were reliable, America would have reached financial Valhalla many boondoggles ago. Econometric formulas omit the “X factor” for government incompetence. Nobel laureate economist George Stigler noted in 1963 that, for the preceding century, “No economist deemed it necessary to document his belief that the State could effectively discharge the new duties he proposed to give it.” Things haven’t improved much since Stigler’s time. Swedish economist Niclas Berggren observed in 2011 that 95% of paternalist proposals “do not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of [government] policymakers.” 

The more power a politician captures, the more flattery he hears, and the more deluded he usually becomes. In the same way that Biden feels entitled to deny media access to the most damning scenes of children in overcrowded refugee centers at the southern border, so he will demand that the media ignore the debacles spawned by his new programs. But at some point, there will be too many fiascos to suppress by a president shouting demands for “unity.” 

Nowadays, the federal government is controlling almost everything except itself. Instead of economic salvation, Biden offers standard D.C. issue “no-fault pseudo-benevolence.” How many more trillion dollars will America waste for another Beltway “triumph of hope over experience?”

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James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative

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The Left's Latest Battleground Is Your Neighborhood

March 1, 2021 By Linda R. Killian 

The progressives running the Biden administration are planning a two-pronged strategy to attack traditional suburban families where they live — in their homes and schools.  The Biden campaign platform, largely written by Bernie Sanders and his supporters, called for initiatives for equity in housing and education.  Going forward, these will translate into actions by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to assert its policy to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing (AFFH) and for the Department of Education to impose Critical Race Theory (CRT) to attack both real and intellectual property.  The strategy got underway with the new president's executive order on equity that calls for "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda."

Their primary weapon is the concept of disparate impact, a conveniently squishy theory that there needs to be no factual finding of discriminatory zoning or racism in schools to conclude that a community is racist.  All disparate impact requires is for a bureaucrat to declare an imbalance of race or income among the residents of a local community or in its school's Advanced Placement courses.

To understand the seriousness of the assault, it is necessary to understand the philosophical origins of the left's positions on private property and the class struggle.  The first tenet of Marxism is the abolition of private real property.  The second is the class struggle between the oppressed proletariat and the oppressing bourgeoisie...........To Read More....

Why Socialist Calculation Is Always Impossible

08/28/2019 Trieu Nguyen

The Austrian school of economics, marked by its unique causal-realist approach, contributed many important insights to the development of economic science. However, regardless of their profound contribution, the Austrian school has been usually charged as “unscientific” due to the lack of mathematical models in the Austrian analysis.

Yet, calculations are being made everywhere in the Austrian framework, since the vital core of their theories is the importance of calculation for economic agents’ actions. Certainly, the concept of the impossibility of a central-planned socialist regime was the most fully elaboration of economic calculations.

The concept of economic calculation was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in his book Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth published in 1920. Prior to Mises’s analysis, there were numerous social thinkers who criticized the operation of a socialist economy since for them, such an economy violates the fundamental nature of human beings. Nevertheless, this criticism was purely based on ethical and philosophical grounds.

Mises was one of the first, along with Max Weber and Boris Brutzkus, who independently proposed an entirely different analysis from a purely economic perspective. However, Weber somehow constructed an ideal-type psychological model,1 and from which he eventually came to the conclusion that a socialist economy is “wasteful” and “inefficient".2 On the other hand, Brutzkus dealt only with concrete problems of Russia.3

Yet, “although to some extent Max Weber and Professor Brutzkus share the credit of having pointed out independently the central problem of the economics of socialism, it was the more complete and systematic exposition of Professor Mises.”4 For Mises, such an economy is not just wasteful and inefficient, it is impossible from a purely theoretical point of view.

Mises’s analysis can be summarized as follow..................To Read More