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This article is featured in the fall edition of our quarterly magazine Sword&Scales. To read the full edition visit: swordandscales.pacificlegal.org

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When I first began in the libertarian public-interest legal movement17 years ago!my work focused exclusively on property rights. In fact, it was my interest in that issue that led me to start out as what Ive referred to as a professional troublemaker (or community organizer, depending on the audience) with the Institute for Justice way back in 2004.

Whats struck me over my more than a decade and a half of work helping place constitutional limits on government power is that we sometimes do our side a disservice by utilizing esoteric legal language or overly philosophic terminology.

When Id give talks about stopping governments from taking property through eminent domainnot for public uses like roads or schoolhouses, but for private ones like condominiums or shopping mallsId try to catch myself in discussing the concept of property rights, or at the very least expand on what I meant beyond the phrase.

Property, of course, doesnt have any inherent rights. We naturally have rights in property. Debates about property rights, then, arent about property. They are about people.

And over the course of human history, the most important property we have tended to own is our home.

Its where we celebrate and grieve, laugh and play, break bread, and grow. Theres both intrinsic and real value, the latter of which often serving as the means for us to do other things in life, like educate our children or build a business.

The sad reality is that government rules often stand in the way of us experiencing all these things. There are countless stories of folks whove been caught in the crosshairs of bad policy, especially on housing, and how thats led us to where we are today, a place where the creation of new homes is costly, difficult, and sometimes simply prohibited. These are the real-world outcomes of the housing crisis.

PLF is moving forward with plans to significantly amplify our litigation on rights in property and legalizing the production of housing, focusing initially on accessory dwelling units (or ADUs).

After all, how we treat propertyourselvesis ultimately up to us. Pacific Legal Foundations charge is to ensure its with respect.

This article is featured in the fall edition of our quarterly magazine Sword&Scales. To read the full edition visit: swordandscales.pacificlegal.org

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Property rights start with the home - Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF)

Whether Texass anti-abortion law survives inevitable Supreme Court scrutiny, it may already have done irreparable damage to what was once known as the conservative movement despite delivering a crucial part of that movement its greatest win.

The law, which bans abortions after six weeks and allows private citizens to sue abortion providers, has already helped energize a progressive pro-choice base that might otherwise have been complacent or demoralized heading into 2022. Meanwhile, the law threatens to upend a decades-long alliance among several factions of the conservative movement.

From the 1970s onward, that movement was a loose confederation of conservatives with various priorities: a strong defense (with a fervent anti-communist wing), fiscal discipline (with a fervent anti-tax wing) and traditional family values (with a fervent anti-abortion wing). But by the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union had made defense and anti-communism less prominent as issues.

So in 1996, conservative activist Grover Norquist announced a new unifying principle. The new common political goal for Republicans, he said, was simple: to be left alone by the government. The Leave Us Alone Coalition was a center-right alliance of conservative and libertarian groups that promoted individual freedom over government involvement.

Norquist, then as now president of Americans for Tax Reform, defined the coalition broadly, including small business owners, the self-employed, home schoolers and gun owners. Democrats, who wanted to raise taxes or increase regulations on all these groups, were part of what he called the Takings Coalition.

Accept that formulation or not, it essentially describes how much of the center-right has seen itself over the last quarter-century.

To be clear: The center-right coalition was not universally pro-life, with many libertarians agreeing to disagree with social conservatives on a womans right to terminate a pregnancy. Nonetheless, the right was mostly unified in its support for conservative judges committed to individual freedom and limited government.

The Texas abortion law threatens to blow up this truce. In empowering anti-abortion activists to sue any party that aids and abets a woman seeking an abortion after six weeks, the law is an open invitation to upend the private lives of untold numbers of Texans. Its not just abortion providers that can be sued; so can friends or relatives who might accompany a pregnant woman, or even a driver hired for the journey. So much for reducing regulations on small businesses or the self-employed.

And for conservatives who have traditionally seen trial lawyers as an adversary, this law is a kind of lawyer-enrichment program. It not only sets a floor of $10,000 in civil claims from a defendant, but it also requires a losing defendant to pay all court costs (the same does not hold if the plaintiff loses).

Its hard to square the philosophy of leave us alone with a law that essentially deputizes private citizens to interfere in their neighbors lives. Previous anti-abortion laws have targeted abortion providers for regulation (or, yes, elimination). This one pits citizen against citizen creating a financial incentive to pry, probe and sue.

It is ironic that the debate over Texass law coincides with increasing calls on the right for greater freedom amid a pandemic. At least members of the Leave Us Alone Coalition are on firmer philosophical ground when they oppose vaccine mandates or mask-wearing in schools. As it turns out, whether you deserve to be left alone depends a lot on who you are, where you live and what youre doing.

Robert A. George writes editorials on education and other policy issues for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously a member of the editorial boards of the New York Daily News and New York Post.

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True conservatives should hate the Texas abortion ban law - theday.com

Legislative Gazette photo by James Gormley

At the beginning of a new administration in Albany, a group looking to attract independent and moderate voters is asking for four major changes it says will clean up a state government with a long and ugly record of corruption and misdeeds.

The group Unite NY is asking Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Legislature to adopt new laws now to create open primaries, change the structure of state ethics commissions, make it easier for minor party candidates to get on the ballot and restrict governors to two terms in office.

New York prides itself as being a national leader in many ways, but this continuing string of corruption has us leading in one category wed rather be last, said Unite NY Founder Martin Babinec, an upstate entrepreneur and 2016 candidate for the 22nd Congressional District. Andrew Cuomos resignation is another black eye on the state of New York but unfortunately the problem runs so much deeper than just one or two bad leaders.

Unite NY which includes the 2018 Libertarian candidate for governor, Larry Sharpe, and Green Party stalwart Howie Hawkins will be running and supporting candidates in upcoming elections, especially those who believe in expanded ballot access, greater voices for voters, open primaries and implementing new policies to restore ethics to government.

New York is still one of nine states with a closed primary process meaning that voters who are not registered to a party are not allowed to vote in primary elections. This affects 3.5 million New York residents who are not registered with a party.

Critics of the current system say closed primaries give undue power to political bosses and incumbents by catering to the 20 percent of extreme partisan voters participating in the primary.

Even without new legislation, this reform can be accomplished by any of the established parties making a simple change to their own partys rules, say Unite NY members, empowering more voters.

Voting rights include the right to vote for who you want, says Howie Hawkins, Green Party candidate for governor in 2010, 2014, and 2018. The draconian ballot access law adopted in 2019 took that right away from third party voters in New York. We now have four party lines that routinely endorse the two major party candidates. It is time to reform ballot access laws in New York State, so they are fair, reasonable, and create multi-party elections.

New York is one of 14 states that does not impose term limits on its governors and this is evident with former governors such as George Pataki and Mario Cuomo serving three consecutive terms. Andrew Cuomo was also on track to serve 12 years in office before his resignation in August.

Allowing a governor to serve for so long creates stagnation by greatly slowing down the speed in which new ideas and people can help serve the state. By limiting a governor to two terms it greatly reduces their chances of monopolizing their power and promotes healthy turnaround for governors and their appointed officials.

Unite NY says restricting administrations to two terms would limit the power of the governor while also slowing the revolving door of influence peddling with former staffers becoming lobbyists.

If Gov. Hochul truly wants to bring a new culture to Albany, then she must take clear action, Sharpe said. She must push for term limits to reduce the odds of another executive believing that they are untouchable. In addition, she must push to open primaries and to remove the recently expanded barriers to third parties access to the ballot. Former Gov. Cuomos fall has shown that the executive needs less power, and the people need more choice.

Unite NY is hoping to establish a ballot line by running a candidate for governor next year to help fill the void created by the loss of five minor parties that previously held statewide ballot access. These smaller political parties were eliminated as the result of 2020 legislation that tripled the qualification hurdles needed to qualify as a minor party.

Gov. Cuomo and lawmakers raised the petition minimum for ballot access from 15,000 to 45,000. Along with this, they also changed the qualifying party threshold from 50,000 to around 160,000 for parties to remain on the ballot for the next election.

Corruption has been a part of New York State history for centuries due to a fundamentally broken system, said Bruce Roter, president of the Museum of Political Corruption. Its a part of our past but doesnt need to be a part of our future.

Corruption has a place in our museum, but not in the halls of our government.

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New group looks to unite reformers, small parties and independent voters ahead of 2022 elections The Legislative Gazette - Legislative Gazette

The new Texas abortion law, possibly coming soon to a red state near you, offers a glimpse into a Republican Party in which social conservatives dominate the coalition. For years, they have perceived themselves to be the junior partners to economic conservatives, who got their tax cuts, deregulation, and slow-walking of the welfare state while the Supreme Court, with no shortage of GOP-appointed justices, forbade school prayer and discovered new constitutional rights to abortion and gay marriage.

Libertarians roll their eyes at this description, if only to avert their gaze from endlessly rising federal spending and debt. The New Deal and the Great Society, or for that matter ObamaCare, have proven just as impervious to Republican rule as Roe v. Wade. But social conservatives, who are thicker on the ground than Social Security privatizers, have become newly assertive.If handledwith a deft enough touch, this revitalization could help bring about the multiracial working-class GOP that pundits liked to talk aboutafter last year's election, when even in defeat the outlines of a more successful coalition were apparent. But social conservativesmust take the right lesson from their economically conservative brethren.

Many people value work, wish the government (and their household) would live within its means, and don't want their money forcibly transferred to the indolent. But when this was built out into a program with the specificity of Paul Ryan's Roadmap, seen as an attempt to shrink the welfare state down to a size where it couldbe drowned in a bathtub, some of these same libertarian-sounding Tea Partiers balked. Dudes in Hayek neckties did not constitute a majority.

A critical mass of voters with moral qualms about abortion, respect for religionand traditional gender roles, and even reservations about drag queen story hour might similarly stop short of endorsing abortion-related lawsuits against unsuspecting Uber drivers, much less the full "common good" roadmap-equivalent of some social conservative elites.

Economic conservatism stalled not just because Republicans aren't principled enough but also because its most sweeping proposals weren't popular enough. Social conservatism must be aimed at more than Twitter trad bros to avoid a comparable fate.

More:
Social conservatives are making the Paul Ryan mistake - The Week Magazine

I cringe a bit about the 9/11 festivities. Not because it honors the first responders and ordinary people who selflessly risked or sacrificed their lives to help people after and during the attacks no greater love hath any man or woman than to put their life at risk for strangers.

But my unease persisted all day Saturday. I read and heard with dismay the word celebration attached to the activities that commemorate a failure of our intelligence community and our own understanding of the world.

9/11 evoked heroic efforts that led to bad foreign policy and worse politics that cost many more lives here and abroad than the attacks themselves. The attacks provided the justification for the invasion of Iraq that left 4,000-plus American soldiers dead and 130,000 Iraqi civilians to be buried.

And then there was Afghanistan, ready to soak up trillions of dollars, more American lives and send even more uncounted Afghans to the grave, leaving irony as a survivor: we lost more trying to avenge the wrong than the 9/11 attack took, and the whole endeavor resulted in American humiliation a few weeks ago. Further irony can be mined from the loss of 13 lives in a withdrawal process that brought out more than 100,000 with more to come an outcome that could have been as morally catastrophic as our cowardly abandonment of the Kurds in Syria.

But the biggest cost may be the American political process. After 9/11, the nation rallied around President George W. Bush, with Democrats and Republicans vowing to set aside partisan politics to protect Americans going forward. He is my president, said Al Gore, the loser of an election decided without the bother of a recount in Florida. Imagine the Big Lie President admitting, even now, that Joe Biden is anybodys president.

Its hard to imagine anything close to that unity today. We cant even unite behind vaccines and face masks without partisan bickering, bizarre conspiracy theories about microchips and the efficacy of horse dewormer (Ivermectin) as a cure. COVID-19 is a deadly virus-caused disease, not a parasite, and the purveyors of the cure are closer to the latter than the former in their usefulness.

I am sufficiently old to have been among the first children lined up for polio shots and, in a later round, sugar cubes. Nobody suggested then that freedom required thousands of us to be encased in iron lungs for the rest of our lives as a sacrifice to the gods of libertarian principle. Nobody cried hoax, and no would-be presidents intervened to prevent us from being vaccinated.

At a young age, we dreaded the needle but the parental units were unrelenting in their support of the philosophy of no pain, no gain. We didnt wait for years more of testing and absolute surety before saving lives. Jonas Salk invented the vaccine and donated the patent on the grounds that no child should be deprived of life and safety in the interest of profit. Polio lives on only in a few places.

During the Revolutionary War against Britain, George Washington required each and every soldier to be scratched on the arm and have live pustular matter inserted in hopes that a mild case of smallpox would result, a risky process called variolation. The fatality rate for this process was 5-10%, not the one in millions resulting from COVID vaccine injections. Civilians and soldiers were strictly quarantined no exceptions, no whining about personal freedom, no waiting for a few years of testing, no conspiracy theories. The inoculated spent a month in medical care before returning to duty. The process was kept secret from the British, who had some immunity from European exposure and could have attacked while many of the soldiers were recovering from the month after inoculation.

In todays neo-libertarian world, its common practice for speculators to buy patents for life-saving drugs like insulin and jack up the prices the next day. Other patriotic capitalists push fake remedies like Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. And it was not long ago that the lovely and inspirational Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc. CEO Heather Bresch raised the price of an EpiPen used to prevent anaphylactic shock over several years to 10 times the price paid in Europe, resulting in her own pay increasing from about $2 million to $18 million.

If the 9/11 attacks had resulted in an ongoing willingness to sacrifice even a tiny bit of our teenage impulse of me first if it were all Americans first instead of America First we would have something to celebrate. As it is, there is little to celebrate beyond the memories of the few who responded and still respond with love over selfishness, celebrated but not emulated in even the tiniest way.

Mick Ireland is double vaxxed and double tested but will go back to masking in the interest of a community he loves. Mick@sopris.net.

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Ireland: Theres something creepy about celebrating 9/11 - Aspen Daily News