Showing posts with label PROPERTY RIGHTS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PROPERTY RIGHTS. Show all posts
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Montana House committee pushes back against "Agenda 21"
By KPAX
Critics of "Agenda 21" have seen it as an evil for years - ranging from bad policy to an erosion of national sovereignty to a harbinger of one-world totalitarian government, grounded in radical principles of environmentalism and socialism. Montana's House Judiciary Committee entered the debate on Monday, endorsing a bill resisting Agenda 21.
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Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Kalamazoo Michigan mother loses home over one missed property tax payment
FOX 17
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Property Rights and Property Taxes—and Countries That Don’t Have Them
 |
| Anthony Freda Art |
Casey Research
Do you really own something that you are forced to perpetually make payments on and which can be seized from you if you don’t pay?
I would say that you don’t.
You would possess such an item, but you wouldn’t ownit—an important distinction.
A ridiculous perversion of the concept of ownership and property rights has infected most of the world like a virus: something that most people unquestioningly accept as a normal part of life—like it’s a part of the eternal fabric of the cosmos.
I am talking about property taxes, of course.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
How to Keep Your Valuables Safe From TSA Thieves
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Thursday, October 11, 2012
Will You Be Prevented From Selling Your Used Items?
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Monday, September 3, 2012
Government criminalizes rainwater collection from your own property
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Saturday, August 18, 2012
Woman Fined $5K For Throwing Birthday Party On Family Farm
Private Property Rights Are Under Assault in America!
Fox News
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Fox News
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Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Woman Sues City of Tulsa For Cutting Down Her Edible Garden
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Thursday, June 30, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Friday, October 8, 2010
Property Rights Gone Wrong
Huffington Post
Most mortgages in America are now backed by our government. And in order for a bank to get that backing from our government it must fill two criteria:
1. The borrowers must be verified by the banks and their agents as qualified.
2. Lenders must fill out paperwork accurately and make sure that when the home's title changes hands, so does the documentation.
But in the past two decades, a whole lot of the time, that never happened.
Why?
For banks and servicers, the motive was money. Banks profited by packaging and selling those toxic home loans. Then they profited again by betting against those same securities. A bet, in essence, that a fraudulent loan wouldn't be paid back.
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Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The Great Divergence: Private Investment and Government Power in the Present Crisis
 |
| Robert Higgs |
Also by Robert Higgs:
Crisis and Leviathan: Observations amid the Current Episode 05/21/10
Campaign For Liberty
Private saving and investment are the heart and soul of the dynamic market process. Together they provide and allocate the resources used to augment the economy's productive capacity, generate sustained long-run economic growth, and thereby make possible a rising level of living. Economic crises interrupt this process by discouraging investors and causing them to consume their resources or to employ them in relatively safe, low-yielding ways. Absent entrepreneurs willing to take the great risks that characterize investments in great technological and organizational innovations, the growth process fades into economic stagnation or even decline.
The present recession starkly displays this characteristic crisis-related abatement of the economy's investment process. Indeed, the decline of private investment during recent years has been much greater than most observers realize. Consider the following data, taken or derived from the most recently revised National Economic Accounts prepared by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis (Tables 1.1.5, 1.1.6, and 5.2.6).
In 2006, gross private domestic investment reached its most recent peak, at $2.33 trillion (in constant 2005 dollars), or 17.4 percent of GDP. After remaining almost at this level in 2007, this measure of investment fell substantially during each of the next two years, reaching $1.59 trillion, or 11.3 percent of GDP, in 2009. This decline is severe enough, but it does not give us all the information we need to gauge the extent of the investment bust.
The greater part of gross investment consists of what the statisticians call the capital consumption allowance, an estimate of the amount of money that must be spent simply to offset wear and tear and obsolescence of the existing capital stock. In a country such as the United States, with an enormous fixed capital stock built up over the centuries, a great amount of funds must be allocated simply to maintain that stock. In recent years, the private capital consumption allowance has ranged from $1.29 trillion in 2005 to $1.46 trillion (in constant 2005 dollars) in 2009. Thus, even in the boom year 2006, about 60 percent of gross private domestic investment was required merely to maintain the economy's productive capacity, leaving just 40 percent, or $889 billion in net private domestic investment, to augment that capacity.
From that level, net private domestic investment plunged during each of the following three years, taking the greatest dive between 2008 and 2009, when it fell to only $54 billion (in constant 2005 dollars), having declined altogether by 94 percent from its 2006 peak! Last year only 3.5 percent of all private investment spending went toward building up the capital stock. Thus, net private investment did not simply fall during the recession; it virtually disappeared.
Unless this drastic decline is reversed soon, the future will be bleak for the U.S. economy. Without substantial net private investment, brisk economic growth is unthinkable beyond the very short run. Although private investment spending has recovered somewhat since it reached its trough in the third quarter of 2009, gross private domestic investment in the most recent quarter (April to June) of 2010 remained 21 percent below its peak in the first quarter of 2006, and net private domestic investment remained about 64 percent below its previous peak.
While this private-sector disaster was occurring, however, the government sector of the economy was booming. The ratio of all federal government spending -- purchases of goods and services plus transfer payments -- to GDP increased from 20.6 percent in the fourth (October to December) quarter of 2007 to 25.4 percent in the most recent (April to June) quarter of 2010.
Of this increase, about 73 percent represents an increase in transfer payments. According to the National Economic Accounts (Table 3.2), federal transfer payments for social benefits to persons -- old-age pensions, unemployment-insurance benefits, disability-insurance benefits, Medicare benefits, and so forth in great variety -- increased from a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $1.28 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2007 to $1.72 trillion in the second quarter of 2010 — a leap of more than one-third in only two and a half years. During the same period, government grants-in-aid to state and local governments rose from a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $382 billion to $525 billion, an increase of more than 37 percent.
Data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the number of private nonfarm employees fell from 114.1 million in 2006 to 108.4 in 2009, and even further this year, reaching 107.9 million in August 2010. At the same time, the number of government employees at all levels increased from 22.0 million in 2006 to 22.5 million in 2009, although a slight reduction has occurred recently, putting the number at 22.4 million in August 2010.
The Federal Reserve System has played a major role during the current recession, acting in unprecedented ways to inject funds into the financial system in general and into selected failing firms in particular, especially AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, which have been effectively taken over by the government, giving rise to a situation in which the government supplies or insures about nine-tenths of all new residential mortgage loans. Before the recession, the Fed's financial assets consisted overwhelmingly of U.S. Treasury securities. It now holds a variety of securities, including mortgage-backed securities valued on the Fed's books at approximately $1.1 trillion. In this way, the Fed has become the major direct source of funds for the government-sponsored enterprises that provided an inviting secondary market for the commercial banks and other primary lenders that inflated the housing bubble.
Through the TARP scheme, created late in 2008, the U.S. Treasury acquired ownership stakes in hundreds of commercial banks.
Of course, the government also took over General Motors and Chrysler, bypassing existing bankruptcy laws and ramming into place restructuring arrangements that served the Obama administration's political goals, especially its support for members (active and retired) of the United Auto Workers.
The foregoing measures constitute only a small fraction of the many significant actions the federal government has taken to augment its size, scope, and power during the current recession. Thus, while the market system's driving force -- private investment -- was being brought to its knees, the government's crisis-driven surge only added an additional discouraging feature to those operating though market channels, such as the reluctance of commercial banks to make new loans and investments and the desire of households to repay debts and increase their holdings of cash balances. A government growing in so many different directions at once, with many additional initiatives -- such as higher tax rates, new taxes on energy use, and new restrictions on financial service providers -- still awaiting enactment or regulatory specification, creates tremendous uncertainty for anyone contemplating a long-term investment: who knows what the contours of future government exactions, restrictions, and requirements will be, and hence whether a particular investment will prove to be profitable or not?
Therefore, a major consequence of the Great Divergence — the starvation of private investment and the feasting of government -- is what I call regime uncertainty. This form of uncertainty is a pervasive incalculable apprehension about the future security of private property rights in capital and the income it yields to investors; indeed, a pervasive apprehension that extends beyond investors to include nearly all private participants in the economy — consumers, workers, and managers, as well as investors -- in regard to the future economic order. The Great Divergence in itself is very bad news. Its effects in enhancing regime uncertainty only make it more unfortunate for everyone outside the privileged precincts of government.
Robert Higgs [send him mail] is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. He is also a columnist for LewRockwell.com. His most recent book is Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government
. He is also the author of Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy
, Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11
and Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.
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Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Absolute power comes from absolute control over food
Ground Reality
Ever since I was a child I have been drinking milk bought directly from a small dairy in my neighbourhood. When I moved to New Delhi, for some months I managed to get my direct supply of milk from a neighbourhood supplier. But soon, the buffalo-keeper moved out his animals under pressure from builders. This was almost two decades back, and since then I am left with little option but to buy processed milk.
However, there are millions in India who can afford to avoid intake of processed milk and I think they are the lucky ones. I wish I could still buy my daily requirement of milk from the small neighbourhood dairies that dot the outskirts of New Delhi, and elsewhere.
I was therefore shocked when I viewed the accompanying video on YouTube.
Police raiding an organic grocery shop in California.
This is certainly outrageous. But this is a grim pointer to where the next battles would be fought. It is not water, as many people believe, but food that will be putting nations at war. You can clearly see, if you want to, where it is coming from. Multinational food giants have been slowly but steadily gaining control over food. They know that absolute control over food is the road to absolute power.
The process of takeover of food simultaneously began on several fronts. It began with Green Revolution in the late 1960s, which was essentially to provide controlled technology to increase farm production in developing countries. This was followed with Structural Adjustment Programme that the World Bank/IMF pushed seeking policy changes through the 150-odd conditionality's that came with every loan. To provide more teeth to the process, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) have been brought in.
Technology is now controlled through the instruments of Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), and unhindered grain trade is made possible by the unjust obligations that developing countries have been made to accept under the so-called free trade paradigm. To complete the control over the entire food chain, the third actor in the game -- food retail -- is now being moved across the national borders. G-20 is pushing for compliance, asking member countries to streamline the norms that facilitate the entry of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Multi-Brand Retail.
Internationally, the food trio -- Monsanto/Syngenta as symbol of the technology providers;Cargill/ADM among the major food trading companies; and Wal-Mart and Tesco representing food retail -- have formed an unholy alliance They operate in unison, making the governments fall in line. Food laws are being changed everywhere across the globe to make it easy for the trio to operate. WTO is helping to push farmers out of agriculture thereby making it easier for these multinationals to march on. IPR laws are bringing the necessary changes in national laws in conformity with internationally designed parameters bringing private control over technology.
The process of takeover of food is now complete.
In the name of food safety, which is a misnomer, food laws are being changed. S 510 is one such law that the US is considering to bring in. One of the world's most corrupt body -- US FDA -- is at work. It is working overtime to outlaw organic food. The prescription is simple: GM food is what you should be eating, organic food is bad for your health. That's the best it can do. The police raid in an organic store in California therefore is just the beginning. You wait and watch. The day is not far when the police will enter your kitchen. In the name of Mendel in the Kitchen, Nina Fedoroff, presently science advisor to the Secretary of State, is working hard to police your kitchen.
I don't know what is happening to the United States. Whenever I see the Statue of Liberty I can't miss the tears in her eyes. Only the Americans refuse to see it. As my film-maker friend Ajay Kanchan often says:America is the country where civil liberties have been mortgaged to the multinationals. People live in virtual tyranny. I am in complete agreement. I can only feel sorry for fellow Americans. But I can assure you the world outside is waiting to help you, to pull you out of the police rule. Come, let us join hands. Let us try to regain our control over what we eat.
And if you still believe, the police is acting right. Read this letter (from someone with the user name 12dogpal): 'They did not ban the H1N1 virus infection at the factory pig farm in Mexico where the virus was released. The pork was still sold in the USA. They didn't close the Wright County Egg farm for poisoning the food supply, they didn't close Wal-Mart for passing out e.coli beef. They didn't stop the drug co's from putting out dangerous drugs, lets face it folks, your government is your worst enemy.'
How true?
As Jawaharlal Nehru had said during the days of the British Raj: Freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might. Start by saying no to S 510. Remember, regaining control over our food is the ultimate freedom.
RELATED ARTICLES:
Raiding and Regulating the New Enemy in the War on Drugs: Rawesome "Foodies"
Food Fascism in the Land of the Free
Secretive Executive Order Establishes "Big Brother" Health Bureacracy
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Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Orwellian DoubleThink: Rights are Privileges
Activist Post
August 31, 2010
August 31, 2010
Rights are Privileges (Freedom is Slavery): The primary duty of all public officials is to protect the rights of citizens as defined in the Constitution, where they shall not make or enforce any laws that violate those rights. In fact, the “checks and balances” were put in place to assure that rights of citizens are not being trampled by one branch of the government. After 9-11, President Bush and other public officials proclaimed that their most important job was protecting the safety of the American people, which basically put an end to our rights coming first.
If the corporate-government fear campaign fails to scare the rights away from citizens, they try to convince the public that rights are now privileges and charge a fee or a tax for the “right” to engage in a certain activity.
Here are a few recent examples where rights are eroding into privileges:
- Air travel has become a privilegesince 9-11. We must now forfeit all rights to our physical being by submitting to naked body scanners that emit unhealthy levels of radiation, or open-palm invasive frisking. Everyone is assumed to be guilty until thoroughly cavity checked for explosives.
- Free-speech Blogging on the Internet is now the target of taxes and licensing fees — the trial financial assault before free speech is ultimately killed with the end of net neutrality. Philadelphia is seeking a blog tax, while South Carolina has attempted to require all controversial speech groups to register, of course with a fee attached.
- Food rights may be disappearing faster than any other rights. Armed raids on raw milk producers and the proposed senate bill S.510 that seeks to essentially criminalize local food are the pinnacle of corporate-government tyranny.
- Rights to use Rainwater is becoming illegal or being taxed by the overlords who control mother nature and the slaves who dare to use her resources. Your basic right to nature’s sustenance is now a taxable privilege in the land of the free.
- Gun rights are under continued pressure by the government and the media to make us believe it is a privilege to own guns.
- Capital rights, or the freedom to spend or invest our own money, are now under assault withcapital controls.
- Property rights erode every time property taxes are jacked up because the Fed creates inflation. We own less and less of our property each day the dollar devalues. Property rights also erode as more strict zoning regulations continually pass.
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