Property rights nutjobs

>From "The Unregulated Offensive," by Jeffrey Rosen, _The New York Times,
2005-04-17, URL
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/magazine/17CONSTITUTION.html

"At the time, it was impossible to know whether Biden was right to worry. He
was surely right, though, that Epstein was promoting a legal philosophy far
more radical in its implications than anything entertained by Antonin
Scalia, then, as now, the court's most irascible conservative. As Epstein
sees it, all individuals have certain inherent rights and liberties,
including 'economic' liberties, like the right to property and, more
crucially, the right to part with it only voluntarily. These rights are
violated any time an individual is deprived of his property without
compensation -- when it is stolen, for example, but also when it is
subjected to governmental regulation that reduces its value or when a
government fails to provide greater security in exchange for the property it
seizes. In Epstein's view, these libertarian freedoms are not only
defensible as a matter of political philosophy but are also protected by the
United States Constitution. Any government that violates them is, by his
lights, repressive. One such government, in Epstein's worldview, is our
government. When Epstein gazes across America, he sees a nation in the
chains of minimum-wage laws and zoning regulations. His theory calls for the
country to be deregulated in a manner not seen since before Franklin D.
Roosevelt's New Deal."


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