Property Rights and Environmental Protection
The query before us, then, is this: Are property rights at
cross-purposes with environmental protection? The response is a flat-out
no. The guardianship of property rights, accurately rationalized, is not
only, not opposed to environmental protection, but is the best guaranty of
environmental protection. After all, who can be expected to be a better
steward of the environment than he who owns it? There is an old maxim that
states, ''just as no one spends someone else's money as carefully as
he spends his own, so too, no one tends to someone else's property as
carefully as he tends to his own.''
Place that property in public
hands, however, and watch the degradation begin. One needs only to gaze
about the world, and from beginning to the end the ages, to those nations
that have given virtually no protection to private property, to see
environmental degradation going hand-in-hand with the loss of property
rights. Quite apart from moral or constitutional reasons, then, there are
powerful environmental reasons, too, for protecting property rights
In America in general, and Albemarle County specifically, we are just beginning to observe the straightforward denial of property rights. The progressive appropriation of property through diverse stealth ordinances, circumventing the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution which requires that when property is taken, the owner must be given just compensation. No, what we are perceiving is something that is much more sophisticated and, because of that, more sinister, more laborious to combat. It is the rise of regulatory takings, so-called, the takings that result not from outright condemnation and transfer of title to the state but from regulation - the title, and the tax burden remaining with the original owner.
With the rise of the regulatory state over the course of the 20th century, we have witnessed a steady wearing down of property rights through such regulatory takings. At every level, federal, state, and local, government has sought to bring about an increasing array of public goods. From lovely views, to historic sites, to wildlife habitat, by imposing an increasing array of regulations on property owners, regulations that often deny those owners otherwise rightful uses of their property.
Under the Supreme Court precedents that have evolved, those owners are entitled to compensation for the economic losses that result only if the losses equal the entire value of the property, which rarely happens. Owners who suffer losses of 50, 75, even 90 percent of previous value get nothing. They are made to pay, literally and directly, for the goods the public enjoys as a result of the regulations.
Needless to say, there is something fundamentally wrong about that
situation. Therefore, you are becoming a part of a growing movement that
is speaking out to correct it. What must be comprehended therefore, is to
frame the problem of regulatory takings against a basic backdrop of
primary principles, the better to show how property rights and
environmental protection do indeed go hand in hand.
