A Man's Home is his Castle

Steve Boland takes on the Protect our Homes Initiative over at SF Cityscape with this scare language:

 ...it's a trojan horse bearing a radical property rights agenda. In fact, part of it has nothing at all to do with eminent domain; it's classic "takings" legislation straight out of the libertarian playbook, an assault on the very idea of land use regulation... this is what the backlash against Kelo has wrought: The door is open, and wolves are outside...

Uh oh....it's those evil libertarian wolves again, trying to foist their agenda on all those good communitarian sheep who believe in "common welfare" and "the greater good". 

We posted this in the comments and it bears saying it again:

The United States was founded on the Lockean proposition that government's authority comes from the consent of the governed. Every so often something happens when the governed tell the government "fuggedaboutit" and Kelo is one of them.

There is a fundamental belief in this country that a man's home is his castle. This belief draws upon English common law. It is central to the rights that our Constitution guarantees, for if you cannot be secure from government intrusion in the privacy of your own home, then you have no rights.

Kelo struck at the heart of this deeply-held belief; suddenly, property owners became mere leaseholders whose leases could be abruptly terminated if a local government found a higher and better for the land your home occupied.

Opposition to the unjust use of eminent domain is not a conservative vs. progressive issue; Kelo was decried not only by conservative property rights advocates such as Congressman Richard Pombo (R-Tracy) but also by liberal Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Inglewood), who understood that the decision would hit hardest poor, minority homeowners whose low value properties would be a tempting target for revenue-hungry city governments.

This is why there has been such an immediate, visceral reaction to the decision by left and right. In one regard Boland is correct; the Protect Our Homes Initiative is not the best property rights law that could have been crafted; but the state legislature was unwilling or able to do so, just as it was unable to pass property tax reform in 1978, which resulted in Prop. 13.

I reject Boland's appeals to "common welfare" and "the greater good" --as reasons to oppose property rights legislation. These are nothing more than progressive shibboleths that are trotted out in the same way a fundamentalist preacher trots out God to argue against gay marriage.

It's worth remembering that the forced collectivization of the peasants in the Soviet Union and the Cultural Revolution in China were for the common welfare and the greater good. Whenever someone uses those terms you know somebody's ox is being gored.

An initiative like Protect Our Homes didn't just happen.  For it to get one million signatures, it had to tap in to an undercurrent of anger at how in recent years land use regulation has tipped the scales in favor of the greater good and against individual rights.  The scales are about to be tipped back.