Your Rights Under Seven50 and Sustainable Development

Seven50 Impact

Outsiders via Seven50 Will Decide For You:

What is the best use for your property and the right to seize it for such uses
How much open space should remain without just compensation
What type of business you may engage in
Where to live
What schools to send your kids
What resources to consume on your property and how much is permittable
What transportation options are permittable
What behavior is permittable on your property
Central planners make decisions for you and your property
Distant bureaucrats take power from locally elected representatives
Property owners become property renters
Possible central planning of eminent domain

Planned Eminent Domain

Seven50 will seek to use the “public good” moniker to help impose and implement bureaucrat led decisions in towns and cities, taking power from local representatives. Those who will benefit from “public good” projects will not hesitate to use Seven50 to push through projects no matter what or who’s home is in their way.

Natural Law and Property Rights

In human nature, the right of self-preservation implies the right to property, and any individual property in man’s products from the soil requires property in the land itself. But the right to property would be nothing without the freedom of using it, and so liberty is derived from the right to property. People flourish as social animals, and through trade and exchange of property they maximize the happiness of all.

Furthermore, since the faculties of human beings are by nature diverse and unequal, an inequality of condition arises naturally from an equal right to liberty of every man. In this way, property rights and free markets, concluded Mercier, are a social order that is natural, evident, simple, immutable, and conducive to the happiness of all.

Or, as Quesnay declared in his Le Droit naturel (Natural Law), “Every man has a natural right to the free exercise of his faculties provided he does not employ them to the injury of himself or others. This right to liberty implies as a corollary the right to property,” and the only function of the government is to defend that right.

Seven50 will impose mandates and restrictions on property rights which could very well affect other rights in addition to the decisions on how best to use private property.

Conservation and Property Rights

Murray Rothbard covers conservation and property rights over the broad range of environmental concerns.

Seven50 will use the guise of conservation to usurp local decisions and restrict the freedoms and choices of individuals.

Human Rights are Propery Rights

From Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty

The concept of “rights” only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.

In the first place, there are two senses in which property rights are identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans, so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings; and two, that the person’s right to his own body, his personal liberty,, is a property right in his own person as well as a “human right.” But more importantly for our discussion, human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory, causing liberals to weaken those rights on behalf of “public policy” or the “public good.” As I wrote in another work:

Take, for example, the “human right” of free speech. Freedom of speech is supposed to mean the right of everyone to say whatever he likes. But the neglected question is: Where? Where does a man have this right? He certainly does not have it on property on which he is trespassing. In short, he has this right only either on his own property or on the property of someone who has agreed, as a gift or in a rental contract, to allow him on the premises. In fact, then, there is no such thing as a separate “right to free speech”; there is only a man’s property right: the right to do as he wills with his own or to make voluntary agreements with other property owners.2
In short, a person does not have a “right to freedom of speech”; what he does have is the right to hire a hall and address the people who enter the premises. He does not have a “right to freedom of the press”; what he does have is the right to write or publish a pamphlet, and to sell that pamphlet to those who are willing to buy it (or to give it away to those who are willing to accept it). Thus, what he has in each of these cases is property rights, including the right of free contract and transfer which form a part of such rights of ownership. There is no extra “right of free speech” or free press beyond the property rights that a person may have in any given case.

In the first place, we may notice that in each of de Jouvenel’s examples—a man attending an assembly, a person writing to a letters-to-the-editor column, and a man applying for discussion time on the radio—the scarce time or space being offered is free, in the sense of costless. We are in the midst of what economics calls “the rationing problem.” A valuable, scarce resource has to be allocated: whether it be time at the podium, time in front of the microphone, or space in a newspaper. But since the use of the resource is free (costless), the demand for obtaining this time or space is bound greatly to exceed the supply, and hence a perceived “shortage” of the resource is bound to develop. As in all cases of shortages and of queueing up caused by low or nonexistent prices, the unsatisfied demanders are left with a feeling of frustration and resentment at not obtaining the use of the resource they believe they deserve.

A scarce resource, if not allocated by prices, must be allocated in some other way by its owner. It should be noted that the de Jouvenel cases could all be allocated by a price system, if the owner so desired. The chairman of an assembly could ask for price bids for scarce places at the podium and then award the places to the highest bidders. The radio producer could do the same with discussants on his program. (In effect, this is what producers do when they sell time to individual sponsors.) There would then be no shortages, and no feelings of resentment at a promise (“equal access” of the public to the column, podium, or microphone) reneged.

But beyond the question of prices, there is a deeper matter involved, for whether by prices or by some other criterion, the resource must, in all cases, be allocated by its owner. The owner of the radio station or the program (or his agent) rents, or donates, radio time in a way that he decides; the owner of the newspaper, or his editor-agent, allocates space for letters in any way that he chooses; the “owner” of the assembly, and his designated agent the chairman, allocates the space at the podium in any way he decides.

The fact that ownership is the ultimate allocator gives us the clue to the property solution of de Jouvenel’s “chairman’s problem.” For the fellow who writes a letter to a newspaper is not the owner of the paper; he therefore has no right to, but only a request for, newspaper space, a request which it is the absolute right of the owner to grant or to deny. The man who asks to speak at an assembly has no right to speak, but only a request that the owner or his representative, the chairman, must decide upon. The solution is to recast the meaning of the “right to freedom of speech” or “assembly”; instead of using the vague, and, as de Jouvenel demonstrates, unworkable concept of some sort of equal right to space or time, we should focus on the right of private property. Only when the “right to free speech” is treated simply as a subdivision of property right does it become valid, workable, and absolute.

While proponents of Seven50 will use soft, cuddly terms to hide the true impact of Seven50 on South Florida, the real impact is crippling. The rights of South Florida residents will be curtailed in order to benefit the few well-connected who profit from the mandates and directives decided by bureaucrats and special interests. Seven50 may very well be led by people with good intentions however the consequences will be the opposite of the intent, making Seven50 the centralized distribution center for poverty across South Florida.

Join the Effort and help Stop Seven50 from ruining South Florida for future generations. Contact your local officials about Seven50 and urge them to not participate in the machinations of the special interests and cronies behind Seven50.

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