#property rights

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private-sector Trumpism

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on WEDNESDAY (Apr 2), and in BLOOMINGTON on FRIDAY (Apr 4). More tour dates here.

Trumpism is a mixture of grievance, surveillance, and pettiness: "I will never forgive your mockery, I have records of you doing it, and I will punish you and everyone who associates with you for it." Think of how he's going after the (cowardly) BigLaw firms:

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/03/skadden-makes-100-million-settlement-with-trump-in-pro-bono-payola/

Trump is the realization of decades of warning about ubiquitous private and public surveillance – that someday, all of this surveillance would be turned to the systematic dismantling of human rights and punishing of dissent.

23 years ago, I was staying in London with some friends, scouting for a flat to live in. After at day in town, I came back and we ordered a curry and had a nice chat. I mentioned how discomfited I'd been by all the CCTV cameras that had sprouted at the front of every private building, to say nothing of all the public cameras installed by local councils and the police. My friend dismissed this as a kind of American, hyper-individualistic privacy purism, explaining that these cameras were there for public safety – to catch flytippers, vandals, muggers, boy racers tearing unsafely through the streets. My fear about having my face captured by all these cameras was little more than superstitious dread. It's not like they were capturing my soul.

Now, I knew that my friend had recently marched in one of the massive demonstrations against Bush and Blair's illegal invasion plans for Iraq. "Look," I said, "you marched in the street to stand up and be counted. But even so, how would you have felt if – as a condition of protesting – you were forced to first record your identity in a government record-book?" My friend had signed petitions, he'd marched in the street, but even so, he had to admit that there would be some kind of chilling effect if your identity had to be captured as a condition of participating in public political events.

Trump has divided the country into two groups of people: "citizens" (who are sometimes only semi-citizens) and immigrants (who have no rights):

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/29/trumps-war-on-immigrants-is-the-cancellation-of-free-society/#fn-53926-1

Trump has asserted that he can arrest and deport immigrants (and some semi-citizens) for saying things he doesn't like, or even liking social media posts he disapproves of. He's argued that he can condemn people to life in an offshore slave-labor camp if he doesn't like their tattoos. It is tyranny, built on ubiquitous surveillance, fueled by spite and grievance.

One of Trumpism's most important tenets is that private institutions should have the legal right to discriminate against minorities that he doesn't like. For example, he's trying to end the CFPB's enforcement action against Townstone, a mortgage broker that practiced rampant racial discrimination:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-28-trump-scrambles-pardon-corporate-criminals-townstone-boeing-cfpb/

By contrast, Trump abhors the idea that private institutions should be allowed to discriminate against the people he likes, hence his holy war against "DEI":

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/29/trump-administration-warns-european-companies-to-comply-with-anti-dei-order.html

This is the crux of Wilhoit's Law, an important and true definition of "conservativism":

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Wilhoit's definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there's another definition I like, one that's more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: "Ask, 'What's more important: human rights or property rights?' Anyone who answers 'property rights are human rights' is a conservative."

Thus the idea that a mortgage broker or an employer or a banker or a landlord should be able to discriminate against you because of the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, your gender, or your beliefs. If "property rights are human rights," then the human right not to rent to a same-sex couple is co-equal with the couple's human right to shelter.

The property rights/human rights distinction isn't just a way to cleave right from left – it's also a way to distinguish the left from liberals. Liberals will tell you that 'it's not censorship if it's done privately' – on the grounds that private property owners have the absolute right to decide which speech they will or won't permit. Charitably, we can say that some of these people are simply drawing a false equivalence between "violating the First Amendment" and "censorship":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

But while private censorship is often less consequential than state censorship, that isn't always true, and even when it is, that doesn't mean that private censorship poses no danger to free expression.

Consider a thought experiment in which a restaurant chain called "No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe" buys up every eatery in town, and then maintains its monopoly by sewing up exclusive deals with local food producers, and then expands into babershops, taxis and workplace cafeterias, enforcing a rule in all these spaces that bans discussions of politics:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

Here we see how monopoly, combined with property rights, creates a system of censorship that is every bit as consequential as a government rule. And if all of those facilities were to add AI-backed cameras and mics that automatically monitored all our conversations for forbidden political speech, then surveillance would complete the package, yielding private censorship that is effectively indistinguishable from government censorship – with the main difference being that the First Amendment permits the former and prohibits the latter.

The fear that private wealth could lead to a system of private rule has been in America since its founding, when Thomas Jefferson tried (unsuccessfully) to put a ban on monopolies into the US Constitution. A century later, Senator John Sherman wrote the Sherman Act, the first antitrust bill, defending it on the Senate floor by saying:

If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

40 years ago, neoliberal economists ended America's century-long war on monopolies, declaring monopolies to be "efficient" and convincing Carter, then Reagan, then all their successors (except Biden) to encourage monopolies to form. The US government all but totally suspended enforcement of its antitrust laws, permitting anticompetitive mergers, predatory pricing, and illegal price discrimination. In so doing, they transformed America into a monopolist's playground, where versions of the No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe have conquered every sector of our economy:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

This is especially true of our speech forums – the vast online platforms that have become the primary means by which we engage in politics, civics, family life, and more. These platforms are able to decide who may speak, what they may say, and what we may hear:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

These platforms are optimized for mass surveillance, and, when coupled with private sector facial recognition databases, it is now possible to realize the nightmare scenario I mooted in London 23 years ago. As you move through both the virtual and physical world, you can be identified, your political speech can be attributed to you, and it can be used as a basis for discrimination against you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

This is how things work at the US border, of course, where border guards are turning away academics for having anti-Trump views:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/world/europe/us-france-scientist-entry-trump-messages.html

It's not just borders, though. Large, private enterprises own large swathes of our world. They have the unlimited property right to exclude people from their properties. And they can spy on us as much as they want, because it's not just antitrust law that withered over the past four decades, it's also privacy law. The last consumer privacy law Congress bestirred itself to pass was 1988's "Video Privacy Protection Act," which bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. The failure to act on privacy – like the failure to act on monopoly – has created a vacuum that has been filled up with private power. Today, it's normal for your every action – every utterance, every movement, every purchase – to be captured, stored, combined, analyzed, and, of course sold.

With vast property holdings, total property rights, and no privacy law, companies have become the autocrats of trade, able to regulate our speech and association in ways that can no longer be readily distinguished state conduct that is at least theoretically prohibited by the First Amendment.

Take Madison Square Garden, a corporate octopus that owns theaters, venues and sport stadiums and teams around the country. The company is notoriously vindictive, thanks to a spate of incidents in which the company used facial recognition cameras to bar anyone who worked at a law-firm that was suing the company from entering any of its premises:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/nyregion/madison-square-garden-facial-recognition.html

This practice was upheld by the courts, on the grounds that the property rights of MSG trumped the human rights of random low-level personnel at giant law firms where one lawyer out of thousands happened to be suing the company:

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/madison-square-gardens-ban-on-lawyers-suing-them-can-remain-in-place-court-rules/4194985/

Take your kid's Girl Scout troop on an outing to Radio City Music Hall? Sure, just quit your job and go work for another firm.

But that was just for starters. Now, MSG has started combing social media to identify random individuals who have criticized the company, and has added their faces to the database of people who can't enter their premises. For example, a New Yorker named Frank Miller has been banned for life from all MSG properties because, 20 years ago, he designed a t-shirt making fun of MSG CEO James Dolan:

https://www.theverge.com/news/637228/madison-square-garden-james-dolan-facial-recognition-fan-ban

This is private-sector Trumpism, and it's just getting started.

Take hotels: the entire hotel industry has collapsed into two gigachains: Marriott and Hilton. Both companies are notoriously bad employers and at constant war with their unions (and with nonunion employees hoping to unionize in the face of flagrant, illegal union-busting). If you post criticism online of both hotel chains for hiring scabs, say, and they add you to a facial recognition blocklist, will you be able to get a hotel room?

After more than a decade of Uber and Lyft's illegal predatory pricing, many cities have lost their private taxi fleets and massively disinvested in their public transit. If Uber and Lyft start compiling dossiers of online critics, could you lose the ability to get from anywhere to anywhere, in dozens of cities?

Private equity has rolled up pet groomers, funeral parlors, and dialysis centers. What happens if the PE barons running those massive conglomerates decide to exclude their critics from any business in their portfolio? How would it feel to be shut out of your mother's funeral because you shit-talked the CEO of Foundation Partners Group?

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/funeral-homes-private-equity-death-care/

More to the point: once this stuff starts happening, who will dare to criticize corporate criminals online, where their speech can be captured and used against them, by private-sector Trumps armed with facial recognition and the absurd notion that property rights aren't just human rights – they're the ultimate human rights?

The old fears of Thomas Jefferson and John Sherman have come to pass. We live among autocrats of trade, and don't even pretend the Constitution controls what these private sector governments can do to us.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/31/madison-square-garden/#autocrats-of-trade

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Rich jerks would rather drown than share

“For a lot of people, the privacy is more important to them than the risk of destruction,” he said, referring to residents who refused to grant easements. “The solution is very easy — pay for your own risk.” Young added that many nourishment projects don’t seem to be worth the money they cost. He pointed to the Jersey Shore, where a $1 million beach nourishment project washed away in just one year.

The knowledge that beach nourishment might not be a good investment doesn’t do much to help local leaders like Flowers, the Pinellas County commissioner, who is bracing herself for a hurricane season that meteorologists predict will be one of the most active in decades.

“I’m very concerned for those homeowners out there who will be impacted because perhaps their neighbor has opted not to allow access,” she said. 

[worldlywritr]

Hubris: When a Rabbit Sees Himself as a Tiger

In a quaint lodge where life often reveals its quirks, a recent episode painted a vivid portrait of hubris, an all-too-common flaw in the tapestry of human behaviour. A young man, with an inflated sense of his own importance, found himself at odds with reality when a child, the owner’s daughter, confronted him as he cut grass on land that was not his.

This boy, blinded by his own perceived righteousness, dared to believe he had the authority to assert his will over a piece of property he neither owned nor had permission to manage. Like a rabbit puffing out its chest, imagining itself to be a formidable tiger, he misjudged his position, overestimating his rights and ignoring the simple truth of ownership and respect.

The child, in her innocence and straightforwardness, demanded he stop, a command that was as much about rightful authority as it was about teaching an unwelcome intruder a lesson. Her approach may have been brusque, but it was rooted in a fundamental understanding that respect for property and boundaries is non-negotiable.

Yet, the boy's reaction was telling. Instead of humility or acknowledgement of his overstep, he chose indignation. He clung to his misplaced sense of entitlement, convinced that his actions were justified and that the girl was in the wrong. His hubris blinded him to the reality that he was, in fact, a trespasser, someone who had overstepped his bounds both physically and morally.

This incident, while seemingly trivial, mirrors a broader human tendency. It is a stark reminder of how easily we can fall into the trap of self-deception, where we see ourselves as more significant than we are, where we inflate our rights and disregard the simple truths that govern respectful coexistence.

Hubris, the fatal flaw of many a tragic hero, manifests in everyday life in such small yet telling ways. When a rabbit sees himself as a tiger, he sets himself up for inevitable downfall, for reality is an unforgiving judge. The lesson here is clear: humility and respect for others' boundaries are not signs of weakness but of wisdom and strength. In recognising our true place in the world, we find the balance that hubris so often disrupts, ensuring that we do not fall victim to our own inflated self-perception.

[tenth-sentence]

Whatever the technologies of the Return, whatever the priorities which less for it and the laws which govern it, whatever the property rights which permit it, it may yet be the case that no one will ever be a natural-born Moonperson.

"The Moon: A History for the Future" - Oliver Morton

[defleftist]

Do people have the right to own property?

Legally? Yeah you can own land. Morally? That’s a bit more grey. I tend to think land stewardship is a more ethical concept. I often look to my indigenous friends for guidance on this.

[hezigler]

[jtem]

Warning! Warning! Warning! Warning!

Unpopular opinion time

Yes. Call it an "Opinion." It's a truth and a dire warning but we'll call it an opinion:

The current "Squatters" problem is about to make a very ugly turn.

Imagine you come home from work one day and your key doesn't work. Your locks have been changed and people are your home! They tell you to leave, get off your property.

You persist. After all, it is your home. You've had a long day. All you want to do is get inside your own home, pour yourself a bowl of cereal and plop down in front of the TV. And here these strangers are inside your home, they changed your locks and they're telling you to get off your own property! So you break in. You break into your own home and confront these strangers.

Then they call the police.

On you.

These strangers in your home, call the police on you. They do.

The police show up.

The home invaders show the damage from where you broke in, show the police some rental agreement they made up, one or more receipts for rent they never paid..probably some bills in their name.

The police arrest you. The police arrest YOU for breaking into your home, trying to wrongfully evict these "Renters" you are victimizing.

Again, this is your home. You live there. You got up that morning, left for work, locked the door behind you and when you came home at the end of the day you found these squatters inside your home.

This is going to happen.

It's going to happen a lot.

Why wouldn't it?

When it comes to squatters, there's literally no difference between them being there for a week or them being their for hours. The police don't see a difference. The courts don't. In both cases it comes down to pieces of paper, and these squatters inside your home made sure to print out lots of authentic and properly dated pieces of paper.

Oh, you'll probably get them out. Eventually. Maybe in only six months! In the mean time you can't get inside your home and God knows what kind of damages they're doing...

It's going to happen.

They just have to pick an address, cherry pick the legal jurisdiction to give them the greatest advantages, print everything out & wait for you to leave for work in the morning.

People are going to start coming home and finding strangers inside their homes. Squatters. It will happen, if it's not happening already.

[volunteerismandanarchy]

Marxists say that property is theft. Why, in your view, is private property so central to freedom?”2 Friedman responded: Because the only way in which you can be free to bring your knowledge to bear in your particular way is by controlling your property. If you don’t control your property, if somebody else controls it, they’re going to decide what to do with it . . . there’s a lot of knowledge in this society, but, as Friedrich Hayek emphasized so strongly, that knowledge is divided. . . . How do we bring these scattered bits of knowledge back together? And how do we make it in the self-interest of individuals to use that knowledge efficiently? The key to that is private property, because if it belongs to me, you know, there’s an obvious fact. Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So, if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

Milton Friedman, In Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas,

[racefortheironthrone]

Weird question, but are syllabi the private property of professors/college?

That is a weird question.

The answer seems to be that it depends on the university. At CUNY, where I work, I own my syllabi, it turns out.

Apparently, this is a matter of some controversy, because conservatives want syllabi at public universities to be considered public records so that they can submit requests for topics they would like to ban from being taught.

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

In our recent podcast with Sovereign Society founder, Karl Wuckert, we discuss the differences between the European and American definition of liberty and how private property rights and the market would yield better results than gov't.

Listen Here: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/podcast/podcast-karl-wuckert-disobedience-militant-non-violence-the-path-to-a-sovereign-society

#TheFreeThoughtProjectPodcast

[bakuninbeats]

(Intellectual) Property is Theft!

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, perhaps the most important figure in the field of anarchist theory. He developed many of the most important cornerstones of the anarcho-communist ideology, the most important of which being the following principle; "Property is Theft!"

Indeed, property is theft. Specifically, private property which forms the cornerstone of our capitalist system. Yet, there is another form of property which can be just as oppressive, namely intellectual property. The ownership of ideas, of art, of symbols, intellectual property offers someone the right to sue others for using the products that originated in their mind. In itself, a seemingly noble idea as it can potentially serve to protect the livelihood of smaller artists, academics and inventors. However, these same people are often not the ones who actually manage to profit from these laws. No, it is primarily the companies who can afford the most skilled lawyers that actually manage to protect their ideas whilst those who might actually need this protection are left to fend for themselves. In fact, smaller artists usually end up being the victim of these kinds of lawsuits especially when it comes to the practice of sampling in music.

In this manner, the right to sample becomes a practice to fight for within the anarchist struggle, especially when the use of sampling serves to criticize the current systems that govern society. Thus, the subject of today's review will be one such artist known as Saint Pepsi and his 2014 music video Enjoy Yourself.

Admittedly, most Vaporwave artists do not explicitly ascribe to anarchist ideology and Saint Pepsi is no exception. In fact he barely has a public persona at all, let alone one that promotes specific political goals. However, the combination of anti-consumerist critique, diy-ethic and, as formerly established, a potent disrespect for intellectual property rights, it becomes clear that Saint Pepsi falls quite neatly in line with the means and ends of the average anarcho-communist, intentionally or not.

But how does the Saint spread our anti-capitalist message in Enjoy Yourself? It is through a process of defamiliarization, and emphasization. The song repeats slowed-down snippets from the song Off The Wall by Michael Jackson. I'm sure Michael needs no introduction, but I'd still like to clarify some things about his history. Michael Jackson had his start in Motown Records, one of the biggest titans in the music industry. Though they have platformed many great artists, they are also one of the primary culprits of the mass-commercialization of popular music. This does not necessarily make their music any worse, but it does make this song a great choice for the Saint Pepsi treatment.

It is set to clips taken from a McDonald's commercial, one of the other titans of consumerism. It features a smiling man with a moon-shaped head (who also became an alt-right symbol for some reason). He dances while playing the piano on top of a hamburger, flying through a city-scape. The city is filled with bill-boards and McDonald's' classic yellow M's. It's a bizzare picture that could only be found within the post-modern, late-capitalist regime we currently live under.

The song ends on the message "Just Enjoy Yourself!~" repeated multiple times, eventually fading out to give the impression of its infinite repetition. On the surface, this phrase gives a sense of calmth and nostalgia, it's an invitation to simply let go and have fun. However, through the constant repetition Saint Pepsi showcases the way that consumer-capitalism controls its subjects.

"Just Enjoy Yourself!~~", everything is completely fine. You have tasty food, fun music, just look at the funny moon-man and

''Just Enjoy Yourself!~~~''.

With this message the song highlights consumerism's role as a primary means to pacify the masses and manufacture its consent. If a society feels the need to constantly repeat the message that everything's fine it's a sign that it's clearly not.

But who gives a shit about what this stupid tranny has to say!?

Who gives a shit about the immorality of property right!?

Who gives a shit about achieving anarchy!?

The system is impenetrable and the world is fucked.

"Just Enjoy Yourself!~~~~"

Link to song:

[johnschneiderblog]

This shoreline was made for walking

I was talking property-rights the other day with a new owner of  Lake Huron frontage.

He conceded that Michigan law gives everybody - property owner, or not - the right to stroll Great Lakes shorelines, but argued that walkers have no legal right to stop on privately owned beaches.

Hmmmmm .... if there's a part of the law that addresses that, I haven't seen it. It would involve complicated questions:

Certainly no law would prohibit a walker from pausing 30 seconds. But how about 30 minutes ...? What about a group of four walkers ... with chairs .... and a boom box ... and a barking dog. ...?

One would hope that common sense would prevail in these cases, but we all know how that goes.

I think the issue is a long way from being settled.

[thirstyratsnake]

my freinds did a silly play so made reaction images lol

kyle isnt ok

[bartinchristchurch]

Everyone in New Zealand must be alert to the fact that when disaster happens, There will be immediate aid but the months and years following are filled with waiting for decisions and wondering whether your claim/case is sitting in the correct pile or not. This may be just a unavoidable result of larger scale events but communication is certainly often lacking. The best thing to know is that many people are working to do their best although the higher up the chain you go, the less true that is.

[shenefelts]

Table 7: Real Property of The Twelve Tables by Rome But Out Of Line (Man’s Law) Page Preview

Listen lady the baseball that I just absolutely crushed into your backyard is still mine.

This isn’t all purple.

I’ll be back with the bat, have it wrapped waiting, or else.