Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (28 page)

The federal government uses an iron fist to show that it is the real “owner” by overriding all state and local laws. Many times these rules and regulations are driven by radical environmentalists. The Environmental Protection Agency, Fish and Wildlife, the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Corps of Engineers, all must be satisfied. There are strong hints that the United Nations will be involved in land management in the United States as well.

Many people believe that the federal government is needed for national parks and therefore they never ask questions about how much land the federal government owns outside of the park system. The truth is that most federally owned land is not part of a national park. The states in the east
certainly have adequate parks without the federal ownership. Who knows, private entities such as Ducks Unlimited or The Nature Conservancy may be the types of organizations that would provide “national” parks in a free society. Fees from the people who use the parks would be a fairer way to finance parks than by taxing the 90 or so percent of citizens who never get to enjoy them.

Over the years I have heard numerous stories about how the wealthy, and yes, even politicians, will purchase their hideaway in a remote area and then subsequently see to it that thousands of acres around them are purchased by the federal government to guarantee their privacy at the expense of the taxpayers. Many private estates are adjacent to government-owned lands and that’s not just a coincidence.

Some argue that in the West, the land has to be managed by the federal government due to the natural resources available. They argue that these resources belong to the people and shouldn’t fall into the hands of a few rich individuals. They, of course, prefer the benevolence of a few wise politicians. Never would they admit that special interests will benefit from bureaucratic and political schemes.

Texas is a good example of how private ownership of land facilitated the development and use of its natural resources—especially oil, gas, and coal. In the beginning, the Spanish land grants allowed large blocks of land to fall into the hands of a few. But over time, for economic reasons, this land was broken up into smaller and smaller pieces. Ownership of the oil was divided according to private property rights, which allowed many less wealthy people to benefit. The risks were taken by the entrepreneurs and the benefits were spread
generously to small landowners with mineral rights and to the workers who labored in the industry. Before joining the union—probably a mistake—the Republic of Texas owned very little land. Texas never needed the federal government to manage its progress, whether it concerned natural resources, agriculture, or ranching.

The rest of the West could be developed the same way as Texas by turning the federal land over to the state to be sold. The natural monuments issue would present the greatest resistance. By making this an exception, a lot could still be accomplished by turning millions of acres over to the states. As the land is sold, a portion of the funds could be used to lower the national debt.

Unfortunately, we’re not moving in that direction. But it’s more likely to happen as a result of the breakdown of the federal government with the states picking up the pieces than by Congress and the President doing it in a deliberate, intelligent fashion.

Our biggest current battle is to restrain the eminent domain enthusiasts at all levels of government. The Fifth Amendment was written more to assure that land taken by the government was adequately paid for than it was to give the right to government to confiscate property at will. This assumption was based on the fact that it was known that governments traditionally do take land at will from private owners. But too often governments didn’t pay fair value for it. It’s actually impossible to precisely define “just compensation” as the Constitution requires.

Values are established subjectively, not by some estimate made by a government agent based on recent sales in the area
or some other scheme. Land or a home may have a special value to its owner. It might have been in the family for a long time. The owners may be emotionally attached to the homes or property for sentimental reasons, and to them it has value far above what the government decides. Pure and simple, eminent domain is government force used to empower the state or help communities as a whole at the expense of individuals. Motivations are generally well intentioned to provide road easements, utility easements, or parks. Requests for government to pay fair value for land taken date back to early Roman law and were recognized in the Magna Carta in 1215.

Recently, though, this device has become an instrument not to serve the “public” but to serve the special interests. The Fifth Amendment was written assuming the government would take property only for “public use”—never for someone else’s private benefit.

Today’s corporations and private businesses ask local governments to condemn land in order to resell it to them. The promise is that the land value will go up, the business will pay more taxes, the municipality will benefit, and the new business will earn more money with its new, preferable location. Sounds like a good deal, except for the individual who was forced to sell the land and lose his or her right of property ownership.

This is a modern distortion and abuse of the principle of eminent domain. If anything, we should be moving in the opposite direction which makes it more difficult to impose eminent domain for the purpose of “public” use. We should not be allowing it for the benefit of some special interest.

A clear understanding of the right to own private property
is crucial in maintaining a free society. Without this, a free society cannot exist.

Epstein, Richard. 1985.
Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain
. Boston: Harvard University Press.

T
he term “racism” is thrown around loosely these days. Sometimes it applies, and sometimes it does not. I define the term as (1) the defining and disparaging of a whole people due primarily to its racial, ethnic, or religious makeup, which leads to (2) the desire to deny an individual or group full rights in the civic community, and (3) the related impulse to see some harm come to an individual or group through private or public means. The terms “racism” or “racist” could apply to one or all of the above.

With this definition in mind, it should be clear that racism is a problem that begins with a denial of individualism. A racist believes that some group trait always trumps all individual traits. This is the first error, and it stems from a desire to simplify the reality of group heterogeneity (people really are different) for the sake of convenience or quick thinking.

I’m not talking about the universal tendency to generalize based on particular circumstances of time and place. This is part of the expectations that we develop based on observed behavior of group solidarity. And of course people act with
group solidarity. If you doubt it, watch any sports match and see the way many thousands can simultaneously cheer for a team. It is not racism, of course, to expect the fans of one team to cheer if their team makes a point. But if you believe that this shared interest of a group obliterates individual differences, or that individual differences do not matter at all by comparison to the group trait, we see the beginnings of a racist cast of mind.

When people cannot let go of generalizations to face the reality of counterexamples, there is a problem. A white person who sees no good in any action or words of a black person provides the most obvious example of racism. Another example of such thinking comes from dismissing the views of, for example, a black economist who disagrees with the socialist bias of the NAACP. The assumption is made that the economist is not somehow “thinking like a black.” The same dismissals can be made by or toward any group. Black leaders can caricature whites and whites can caricature blacks based on group prejudice. This is different from regular prejudices, which one might say are a normal part of life and constantly being formed and corrected based on real-world experience.

The problem of personal attitudes is, however, not the crucial issue. The problem is how these attitudes come to have a political expression. During the great wave of European immigration to the United States in the late nineteenth century, the anti-Italian and anti-Irish feelings on the part of the majority might have been understandable from historical context, but they led to real effects in the form of political disabilities being imposed on these groups. It was the same with the Jim Crow laws that followed Reconstruction in the South.
Such laws not only violated human rights; they led to long-simmering resentments that had terrible human and political consequences.

Wartime is an environment that breeds wicked forms of racism. This is because governments love to turn existing prejudices into hate in order to mobilize the masses. In the First World War, the anti-German hysteria led to suppression of German cultural forms and widespread suspicion toward German Americans. In the Second World War, Germans suffered again, but Japanese even more so. It is incredible to imagine the horrible truth that all Americans of Japanese descent were rounded up and put into concentration (“internment”) camps. During the Cold War, Russians in the United States were suspected of being communists until they openly and aggressively proclaimed their hatred for the rules of their homeland.

If we hate racism, we must also hate war since it is war that has bred all these malignant types of racism. In our time, we observe the same happening to those of the Islamic faith. Members of both parties are demonizing these people and encouraging an anti-Islamic feeling across the broad population. Christians are being told, as in George Orwell, that “we’ve always been at war with Islam,” that Islam is an inherently warlike religion, that “they” are taking over America with their mosques, clothing, and law. This whole campaign has the earmarks of a new Cold War, and perhaps hot war, in which Islam replaces atheistic communism as the enemy of choice.

What is striking about this form of racism is how little it has to do with reality. The 9/11 hijackers were not devout Muslims, but we are often led to believe that they were. The
government of Saddam Hussein was secular, not an Islamic state, though the U.S. attack and decadelong sanctions against Iraq were sold to Americans as a part of a “clash of civilizations” and the beginning of a long struggle against Islam. There can be no question that government elites are leading Christians and Jews to believe that the struggle against Islam is our most important foreign policy priority.

What none of this mentions is that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism lived in peace, sometimes in the same regions of Europe, for some 700 years between the eighth and fifteenth centuries. This period in Spanish history is known as the Convivencia, or coexistence. It is widely credited with having brought the wisdom of Greek philosophy to Europe. How did this happen? Through trade, cultural exchange, and liberal institutions of law. This is possible. It is possible now if we would stop this endless circle of attack and reprisal, from which only the governments of the world benefit. Peace can happen again, but only if the United States stops occupying Arab countries, supporting governments that are not supported by their people, funding occupations in the Middle East, imposing sanctions against Islamic countries, and inspiring anti-Islamic tirades within the U.S. population.

I can well remember propaganda from the 1980s under the Reagan administration, when conservative leaders claimed that it was crucial for the anti-Soviet cause that Americans embrace Islam. And why? Because Islam was against secular liberalism, for the family, and, most importantly, against Soviet rule in Afghanistan. The “freedom fighters” might be violent and hold to a different religion, but that didn’t matter because they opposed the Soviet occupation, which was all
that mattered given the political priority at the time. Never mind that these very people later morphed into the hated Taliban that we overthrew and who now constitute the core of al Qaeda!

Government-backed racism is designed to shore up government power. The idea is to steer popular opinion that should be directed against one’s own government toward some evil foreign enemy. This is the essence of the propaganda that has accompanied every U.S. war effort—and probably every war effort by every government. Racism thrives on dehumanizing people, encouraging people to believe that the object of their hated is not deserving of human rights. It is even more despicable when governments do these things even as they claim to be protecting the rest of us against racism at home.