#property rights

[penig]

Parents have no control over Halloween candy! It doesn't belong to them, it belongs to the kid whose bag it landed in! The only rules that applied were the rules of the house - designated snack times, no food in the middle of the night. The only times the parents should handle them are a general check for needles in Snickers bars (which doesn't actually happen) or whatever on Halloween night, and when a kid explicitly shares something.

My parents took the "one piece a day" approach. But I usually found where they had hidden the bag and snuck a few more.

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[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. 

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Elie Mystal

“Civil asset forfeiture” is the legal euphemism for when the cops steal your stuff. In this country, if you are stopped or arrested, the police can take all the personal property you have on you and call it “incident to the arrest.” That property can include your phone or your legally purchased guns, and it almost always includes your car.

When cops decide to help themselves to your property, they can do it without a warrant, without securing a conviction, without even charging you with a crime. Once they’ve taken it, the cops then force people to engage in a long legal fight to get their stuff back. Often, the value of the property stolen by the government is less than the cost of lawyers needed to fight the government. There’s no right to public counsel when the cops steal from you, so most people can’t afford to fight them, never get their stuff back, and the cops end up selling it for profit.

Civil forfeiture is a booming business and has become a key source of income for some cities and entire states. According to “Policing for Profit,” a report from the Institute for Justice, federal, state, and local governments made $68.8 billion from civil forfeiture between 2000 and 2019.

Most people I know think that civil forfeiture should be unconstitutional as a point-and-click violation of the Due Process clause. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments both say that we should not be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Civil forfeiture is literally depriving people of their property with no process at all.

Unfortunately, most people I know are not on the Supreme Court. On Thursday, the six unelected Republicans who rule this country said that civil forfeiture can continue to happen so long as the government eventually provides a hearing, even if the hearing takes place long after the theft and most people can’t afford to appeal.

The case is called Culley v. Marshall and deals with two straightforward civil forfeiture examples from Alabama. Halima Culley loaned her car to her son, who was stopped and arrested while driving with marijuana. Lena Sutton loaned her car to a friend who was subsequently busted while driving with methamphetamines. Alabama cops seized both vehicles, even though they didn’t belong to the person driving them, and didn’t return them to their real owners even after they learned of their mistake. Instead, the cops made a civil forfeiture claim and attempted to keep Culley’s and Sutton’s cars.

A report from the Southern Poverty Law Center found that Alabama made $2.2 million in 2015 from stealing property through civil forfeiture, so the cops are fairly heavily incentivized to take property even when the owners are not guilty of anything. But according to alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, Alabama’s grand theft auto operation is just fine.

Writing for a 6-3 majority (it was the usual split: all Republican justices in the majority, all Democratic justices in dissent), Kavanaugh reduced the issue to one of timing. The plaintiffs Culley and Sutton wanted the state to provide a “preliminary” hearing and force the police to justify stealing their cars. Kavanaugh said that the state already provides a “timely” hearing and said that all the plaintiffs wanted was to get their stuff back more quickly. He argued that the plaintiffs’ arguments were just “a backdoor argument for a more timely forfeiture hearing to allow a property owner with a good defense to recover her property quickly.”

As he does so often, Kavanaugh willfully missed the point. The plaintiffs want to stop the government from taking their property, not argue after the fact that the government should give it back. Remember, we’re talking about cars here. If the cops arrest somebody and take their car, then find out later that the car does not belong to the person they arrested, the normal (and constitutional, and basically decent) thing to do is return the car to its rightful owner. But instead of returning the cars to the people who own them, the police in these cases wanted to not only keep the cars but then force the owners to enter into litigation against the police to get the cars back. That’s not a timing issue: That’s a mugging issue.

Think about it this way: If the cops arrest somebody and throw them in jail, the accused is entitled to a preliminary hearing where the government has to explain to a court why that person should be kept in jail and denied bail. That hearing is different from the trial to convict and sentence the person. As a threshold issue, cops have to explain why they locked somebody up. The same constitutional rule should apply to a person’s property. If the police jack a car, they should be forced to explain to a court why they’re keeping the car instead of releasing the car on its own recognizance (just pretend that the car is Lightning McQueen).

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor (joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson) made a critical distinction between criminal forfeiture and civil forfeiture. It’s one thing if the property involved is the subject of crime. If the car itself is stolen, or if the car is a getaway vehicle that may contain blood or other evidence of criminal activity, one can understand why the cops might need to keep it. Criminal asset forfeiture can also be a form of punishment—for instance, in the unlikely event that a Wall Street type is ever forced to disgorge illegal or fraudulently obtained profits.

Civil forfeiture, however, requires no crime. Sotomayor notes that 80% of civil forfeiture cases “are not accompanied by any ultimate criminal conviction.” She further argues that unchecked civil forfeiture can also lead to false pleas and settlements from property owners desperate to just get their stuff back. She writes:

“Loss of a car not only 'takes away one’s ability to commute' but also imposes a barrier to 'buy[ing] necessities, access[ing] healthcare, and visit[ing] family members, pharmacies, grocery stores, hospitals, and other essential services.' … Given these burdens, low-income communities are also the most vulnerable to pressure from unchecked prosecutors, who can use coercive civil forfeiture processes to extract settlement money from innocent owners desperate to get their property back.”

Kavanaugh was unmoved by these arguments, noting only that states are free to rein in civil forfeiture abuses through legislation but the Constitution does not require them too. It’s worth noticing that the Republicans who claim to care so much about private property and protecting citizens from government “theft” when it comes to environmental regulations or tax laws have no problem allowing states to steal cars from innocent citizens who aren’t even charged with crimes.

For what it’s worth, while Kavanaugh is probably off at a Buffalo Wild Wings somewhere wondering if Alabama can use its forfeiture funds to hire better offensive coordinators for their football programs, Justice Neil Gorsuch seemed at least to struggle with his intellectual hypocrisy. Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion (joined by Justice Clarence Thomas) where he declared both the majority and the dissent to be right.

Oh, he came down on the side of the Republican majority of course, because even if both sides are right, Gorsuch usually thinks the Republican position is more right. And, because this is Gorsuch we’re talking about, he treated us in his opinion to an archaic, intellectually masturbatory discussion of the law of “deodand”—which (I’ve now been forced to learn) was the 11th-century English equivalent to civil forfeiture: Property that caused someone’s death was forfeited “to God” or “the Crown,” but usually the local lord who needed some cash.

Luckily, Gorsuch didn’t seem fond of this particular 11th-century law (probably because he couldn’t figure out how to use it to hurt women or Black people), so the legal upshot of Gorsuch’s concurrence was this musing:

“Why does a Nation so jealous of its liberties tolerate expansive new civil forfeiture practices that have 'led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses'?… In this Nation, the right to a jury trial before the government may take life, liberty, or property has always been the rule. Yes, some exceptions exist. But perhaps it is past time for this Court to examine more fully whether and to what degree contemporary civil forfeiture practices align with that rule and those exceptions.”

What I think Gorsuch is saying is that if some kind of carefully crafted lawsuit came before the court, Gorsuch (and Thomas) would declare at least some aspects of civil forfeiture unconstitutional. I don’t know what that lawsuit would look like. In this case, Culley and Sutton were asking the court to impose a process, that of a “preliminary” hearing, on the states, but we already know that justices like Gorsuch and Thomas don’t like for the courts to do anything to proactively stop the states from violating the Constitution or civil rights (unless the states are trying to keep guns out of the hands of mass shooters—then they think the Constitution gets violently angry). They were never going to go for this one, theft of private property be damned.

But perhaps a lawsuit challenging the asset seizure itself instead of the timeliness of the hearing would tickle Gorsuch’s fancy. I’m sure he could find something from Beowulf about the proper procedure for stealing a golden cup.

In the meantime, the cops will continue to rake in billions of dollars from taking people’s stuff. As usual, Republicans have rendered the Constitution impotent in the face of any two-bit criminal who happens to wear a badge instead of a ski mask.

[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.

[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.

[curiousorigins]

So we all know about the older generation freaking out about the birth decline right? And that one of the reasons has been that they're worried about not enough people around to care for them in their old age.

(Hence one reason why supposedly there was a push to revoke Roe V. Wade because that would magically solve it. [even though lots of women died of birth related complications prior to Roe and now people are literally getting themselves sterilized to prevent that fate.])

But anyways, I have a new theory, it's about real estate. If people are truly dying faster at a significant rate than people are being born, then one, a lot of us will be inheriting property. Two, there may be an excess of real estate very soon, if birth decline trends continue.

What is one of the hardest things in a person's life to attain, property a place to live. Which has definitely been used to control people.

There's also a fact that real estate up until fairly recently was considered one of the safest ways of investing money. Most people would rather sell their home than not pay their mortgage.

What are the two ways that rich people make money without labor or control their workforce (if they're even business owners at all.)?

In interest, via people paying for their mortgages and in owning and renting property. Who's going to bother renting if there's a bunch of houses? How worthwhile will their many acres be if there's a ton of empty houses? Their land won't be gaining value just by existing in their names anymore.

If a true excess of houses happens, then the main money in real estate ventures will actually be in repairing them, maintaining them, and customizing them. All jobs that would be considered blue collar work that actually requires real labor.

The rich people paid various analysts to say that a declining birth rate would make the old people not get care (Which makes sense because the party that serves the richest also tends to be voted for via old people.) So they chose a fear that most of their voters would care about to take advantage of...

But yeah, it's about real estate and banks and not making interest anymore for doing nothing but holding onto resources. Also obviously the less people there are, the more valuable all laborers would be too. When there's more people than jobs, that's an employers market, right? They can lowball their workers and the workers have to go for it because they need a place to live and eat. Where there are more jobs than people, that's an employees market. Where the main negotiation actually favors them, because they are hopefully empowered to know that the company needs them more than they need that company.

[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.