Zoning - Smart Growth - Land Preservation vs. Property Rights

Written By: Jerry Hanson  |  Posted: Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Private property rights need to be the concern of every American Citizen. If your home is in the city or if you rent an apartment, you might brush these articles on property rights aside thinking they are not relevant to you. Let me assure you that we all must become informed on this issue if we hope to retain what liberty remains in this country. Though the current battle over property rights is focused on rural America, city dwellers' rights and standards of living will be degraded equal to, or more so than the rural landowners targeted by these international "Sustainable Development" elitists through there Planning Commissions and ostensible environmental concerns.
In a subsequent article, I hope to suggest some solutions to restore property rights. But since property rights are inextricably bound to liberty it is important to examine further the attempts to undermine this most fundamental of unalienable rights. Either we have been slack to hold our elected officials accountable to the Constitution, or we have been deceived by very crafty charlatans to surrender our God given rights, or both. Have we awakened too late from our political slumber? Have the charlatans already delivered the the death blow to our Constitution?
It is vitally important to realize that liberty cannot exist apart from the unalienable right to own and use our property as we please. Any restriction upon that right, other than we cannot harm our neighbor, impairs creativity, productivity, economic growth, and the well being of society. Contrary to the environmentalists claims, private property rights are also essential to the ecological well being of our planet.
Liberty and private property rights spawn free enterprise and responsibility. A farmer who derives his livelihood from the production of his well maintained soils is going to be far more concerned about the sustainability of his practices than any bureaucrat. He will not have to conduct an environmental impact study to know how best to preserve his way of life and his environment. He lives and works on his farm 24/7. He will take great care to not harm the environment he hopes to pass on to his children and his grand children. That which is good for the farmer as he applies good stewardship principles to his land, is also good for the ecology. When government assumes (usurps) the role of land manager and limits or controls the land's uses, it is a disincentive to the farmer or the property owner. His creative ingenuity to solve an ecological conflict is stymied. The incentive to be innovative is drowned under a sea of bureaucratic red tape and expensive litigation.
The control, and ultimately the elimination of private property is the cornerstone of collectivism. How have we as a society become so apathetic to the collectivist takeover of our property? Most of us know the collectivist control of property destroyed creativity and production in the Soviet Union. It resulted in severe shortages of the necessities of life. Do you remember the pictures and news clips of long lines to get a loaf of bread and the sparsely stocked shelves in grocery stores in Moscow? Without private property rights there is no incentive to be productive. If we cannot keep and use our property as we wish, why work to obtain it, or create it?
Some might argue that we are far from a Soviet style collectivism in the United States. We are not as far from it as it might first appear. Zoning laws and Comprehensive Planning are the tools of the central planners. "Sustainable Development" through zoning, smart growth and comprehensive planning is as collectivist in philosophy and outcome as Soviet style communism. It binds innovation and promotes degradation. It erodes human happiness and peace, and pollutes the stream of man's moral responsibility to his Creator and his fellow-man. The very sustainability the government seeks by taking authority over land management will leave the land wasted, depleted, unproductive, and mismanaged. This agenda, led by the international power hungry elitists, to gain control over the vast majority of America's land, will create food and natural resource shortages deliberately engineered to wean Americans off their "gluttony, " and to transfer their wealth to the less fortunate of the world under the guise of "social justice." Such statements a few years ago would have seemed bizarre, irresponsible, and incredible, but today they are proudly proclaimed in the headlines of the liberal media as the accepted norm.
Americans, we are already suffering the consequences of the globalists' indoctrination of our minds and their takeover of private property. Governors and legislators all across the United States are implementing the globalists' agenda. Here in Wisconsin the Working Lands Initiative was passed into law this past year. Included in this bill is the attempt to lure farmers and other land owners to put their land into conservation easements. Under this scenario, the state buys from the landowner a conservation easement. The landowner is left with the land that can be used only for agriculture or forestry. The state becomes the superior owner and the landowner becomes the residual owner. The conservation easement is perpetual, and there is no provision to renegotiate the terms if the contract becomes unworkable or overly burdensome. The terms of the conservation easement contract are technical allowing burdensome clauses to go unnoticed by the landowner. Add to this the states tendency to change the rules of the game, and conservation easement lands will likely fall into state ownership. This is the hope of radical preservationists. In the April 22, 2006 issue of the Press-Republican, Neil Woodworth of the Adirondack Mountain Club is quoted as saying, "At that point if you can't develop it [land in a conservation easement], and you can't economically grow trees on it [or farm it], and you've already sold the development and conservation rights to the state, then the state is the most likely buyer of the fee title." (Words in brackets are mine). You can see that if farming in Wisconsin continues to be as economically unsustainable as it has in the past few years, how millions of acres of agricultural land in these conservation easements will depreciate in value with no interested buyers except the state or one of its eager and callous radical environmentalist partners, such as The Nature Conservancy, The American Farmland Trust, The Land Trust Alliance, The Sierra Club, and others.
Wisconsin is well under way to becoming the leader in the annihilation of the citizen's right to own and control private property. What the state can not afford to do through eminent domain, they can do through conservation easements, but only if we fall for their deception.
If you doubt, but suspect that I might be correct in my assessment of the loss of property rights and the United Nations' attempts to control all land in the United States, I have succeeded at least in planting the seed that those of you with an open mind will allow to come to fruition as additional facts and experience water the fertile soil of your minds. You landowners that have learned first hand that our property rights are already gone, or at least in serious jeopardy, know that what I have written in these articles is true. We have only scratched the surface of the chicanery going on at all levels of government in the name of so called, sustainability, ecology, and equity. Now is the time to work together to restore our property rights, so we can leave to our children a constitutional republic with all its glorious liberty.