Well Howard Rich has been a busy man.
There is a law on the ballot in four states that says if I want to open a hog farm or a chemical plant next door to your house and you don't want me to do that, then YOU have to PAY ME not to -- you have to pay me ALL THE MONEY I MIGHT HAVE MADE.
It appears he has been busy spreading his views of libertarianism and good government nation wide.
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Libertarian Karen Floyd Howard Rich
3 comments:
I don't know if these ballot initiatives are as extreme as the link implies, but these certainly expand the rights of developers and appear to take a significant amount of power away from municipalities to control their development by making it a lot more costly to them to enforce controls. It is not going to be home owners paying for people not to put in the hog farm, but it is going to be the municipality not stopping the hog farm because they can't afford to pay the loss in value. My favorite was the California amendment which seems to imply that you can still regulate for health and environment, but have to pay for it. It also appears to put a hole in condenced zoning ordinances where the developer puts the same number of houses on a smaller amount of land while leaving a certain percentage as open space (reduce lot sizes by 20% and leave 20% of the entire property as open space). As I read the amendment, the town would still have to pay for the 20% of open space even though the developer really didn't lose any value over what he would have gotten without that zoning.
Bad zoning loopholes.
You are right it is a overstatement, a kind of worse case thing, but the end goal for many in this effort is to make the fiscal penality for any land restrictions so high as to make zoning go away.
It is this pro buisness, pro rich libertarianism at it very worse, and one of the reasons I am no longer a libertarian.
That's not libertarianism, that's fascism.
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