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Owning property has become a privilege, not a right Editorial by Michael Pattinson 7/18/03
Welcome to our world, Metallica. Every day, we in the homebuilding business see how property rights are under attack. So we are hardly surprised when people who take land from us don't hesitate to borrow a few electrons from you.One music writer claims we should ignore a publisher's property rights because people who illegally download music are more likely to buy more music. Others claim it is an invasion of privacy for the government to peek into our hard drives to see if we are entitled to its contents. Still others say this is just a plot for publishers and copyright
owners to make even more money. At least they got that right. As if making money is the crime, and stealing another's property is not. What's a few electrons among friends? For the past 25 years in California and across the country, property
rights have eroded to the point where owning property is a privilege,
subject to the whims of local, state and federal government agencies
as well as a host of other special interest groups. The right to free land - at our expense - has been extended to birds,
lizards, bushes, bugs, students, drivers, park-users and just about
everyone else who shows up at a city council meeting when a housing
project is seeking approval. The results? In California, a new home now costs six times the average person's income, when it should only be three. Though mortgage rates have never been lower, a family's ability to buy a new home has never been more remote. Those who assert their rights are derided in the popular press as
``greedy." Just look at what happened to members of Metallica
when they appeared before a Senate committee asserting their rights
to their own music. Rock stars don't need more money, they were told. They already have
too much. And as for their right to sell their songs to whomever they
wanted, however they wanted, that wasn't really a right. Not compared
to the rights of college kids to free music. Property rights are one of the few rights not celebrated in song, curiously enough, because fewer of them means less artistic expression. The right to own property is our most fundamental and important civil right. Without property rights, there is no freedom. What the music pirates don't recognize is that a copyright is property, no different than a car, a house, or a newspaper. And people who own property are entitled to use it as they see fit. That is the essence of our freedom in this country. If the creative community is now suffering from eroding property
rights, they have only themselves to blame. Many have been in the
forefront of the battle to destroy these rights for others. Think about how the movies portray developers as villains for trying
to build new homes, while the people who stop them are portrayed as
heroes. As for musicians, what would a rally protesting a new housing
development be without a rock star or Hollywood celebrity? The same rock stars who now wonder why no one respects their property
rights. More than kindness matters, Jewel. After all, what is the harm in transferring a few electrons at no cost to the property owner? We are not holding our breath waiting for the Senate to see the wisdom
in Hatch's proposal. If that were the case, computers at the Sierra
Club and a thousand other land-grabbing organizations would have gone
up long ago in a puff of pure, white, cleansing smoke. |