Free It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong by Andrew P. Napolitano

money, which is earned by the fruits of your labor, is also your property. As well, and most importantly, your natural rights are your property. Assuming that the government’s eminent domain power was legitimate, every time it limited, restricted, or took away any of our rights, it would have to provide us with just compensation. When President Bush signed the Patriot Act into law, taking away our rights to privacy, due process, habeas corpus , free speech, and freedom from illegal searches and seizures, did any one of us receive any just compensation for these takings?
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    If You Want to Use Your Property, You’re Going to Have to Run It by Us First
    At common law, people were not required to obtain a permit in order to use their property as they wished. Common law limits free use only when a use unfairly invades the property rights of others. The law calls this a nuisance. Tell that to a landowner in Pacific Grove, California, on the Monterey Peninsula. If a landowner there wants to build a house, he or she must get approval of the plans. This approval process requires twenty public hearings and the approval of the Architectural Review Board, the Planning Commission, the City Council, and the California Coastal Commission. The process takes three and a half years and requires more than six hundred thousand dollars for costs, lawyers, and studies. During one hearing, an Architectural Review Board member said, “In my former life as a seagull, I was flying up and down the California coastline and saw your house built shaped as a seashell.” She subsequently voted against approving the plans for a non-seashell-shaped house; so much for that common law standard whereby you were not required to get a permit to use and enjoy your property.
    This common law rule has been challenged on a more philosophical level with calls for immigration reform. As Glenn Jacobs, the wrestler “Kane,” notes, Americans clamor that illegal immigrants are destroying “our” hospitals. However, these hospitals belong solely to their proprietors, not to “us.” We have no ownership rights over them whatsoever, and are wrong to impose reforms that would limit to whom the hospitals’ proprietors can provide services. Although immigration policies may accomplish this result in a more back-door, surreptitious manner, it is still just as antithetical to a Natural Law scheme of private property rights as the state seizing them directly.
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    A New Way to Take Property
    University of Chicago Professor Richard Epstein’s 1985 book, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain , supplied the momentum for a challenge to the regulatory takings. Epstein proposed to challenge the entire New Deal as “inconsistent with the principles of limited government and with the constitutional provisions designed to secure that end.”
    One of the provisions of the New Deal that Epstein called an unconstitutional taking was minimum wage law. Epstein asserted that minimum wage laws are “undoubted partial takings, with all the earmarks of class legislation, which requires their complete constitutional invalidation.” This was the case because employers are forced to pay a statutory minimum wage frequently higher than wages set by the free market. These business owners suffer from a government taking of their property, since they can no longer use their property as intended; because they are forced to spend more of their money, which is their property, on labor.
    Epstein also claimed that collective bargaining was “yet another system in which well-defined markets are displaced by complex common pool devices whose overall wealth effects are in all likelihood negative and whose disproportionate impact, especially on established firms, is enormous.” Epstein raised the question: Who feels the adverse effects of collective bargaining? He then answered this by stating that adverse affects were felt