Review

Property Matters

The theme of this book is that the government is progressively destroying property rights. You will find yourself incredulous at the extent of this injustice – which DeLong unsparingly depicts.

Through a suffocating array of legal tools – including endangered species laws (which he shows are motivated mainly by religion and primitive animism), wetland laws, zoning laws, historical preservation laws and coastal protection laws – government can do virtually anything it wishes to property owners. These laws are egregiously non-objective ("a wetland is whatever we decide it is" says the Army Corps of Engineers) and self-contradictory. DeLong writes: "Exactions [by zoning commissions] easily turn from user charges to extortion. Because land use rules are so amorphous . . . landowners cannot be certain of their right to do anything."

If this seems exaggerated, consider the following example from the book. A property owner in Monterey, California, wanted to build a house on his property. Getting approval required 20 public hearings and consent four separate government review boards – a process that took three and one- half years and cost the owner over $600,000. At one hearing a board member who objected to the proposed house explained: "In my former life as a seagull, I was flying up and down the California coastline and saw your house built shaped like a seashell." She then voted against any non-seashell-shaped house.

Readers should be warned that although DeLong thoroughly documents property rights abuses and is generally in favor of property rights, his own philosophic concessions to pragmatism undermine his very convincing case.

Nonetheless, this book fully exposes the massive attack on property rights – and makes an urgent plea in their defense. The author concludes that "defining property rights and protecting people's personal right to property should be a major, and highly honorable, preoccupation of the legal system." Instead, we face "a mushy reliance on uncontrolled government whim, faith in discredited doctrines of central planning, and sentimentality. It is not a pretty landscape." It certainly isn't.

(390 pages)

This review is courtesy of and copyright © by the Ayn Rand Bookstore.

Books

• Property Matters, How Property Rights are Under Assault -- and Why You Should Care by James V. DeLong. Government is progressively destroying property rights.