Author Archive | David Wilens

Laissez-faire capitalism calls for a separation of state and economy, without regulation of private sector businesses by government.  But don’t businesses need to be regulated by governments to protect people’s individual rights?   The answer is: no, they don’t.   But then, if businesses are not regulated, what would stop them from rampantly making dangerous [...]

One of the mantras that the protesters against war with Iraq are currently using, sadly with some success, is that such a war would be “preemptive”, rather than retaliatory and in defense of the United States, and therefore unjustified morally. Iraq, a cruel dictatorship though it may be, has nevertheless done nothing to us, the [...]

The Coming to the Nuisance Doctrine is the only objective means of determining who has the right to continue using his property in the event of a nuisance. If zoning is to be replaced, therefore, it must be replaced with the Coming to the Nuisance doctrine. Since it is the only objective means of determining [...]

“Coming to the Nuisance” means exactly what it sounds like: if a property owner is using his property so as to cause a nuisance to another property owner, then the property owner who was the earlier to start his particular use is the one who has the right to continue his use. The other property [...]

The proponents of zoning claim that such initiation of force is necessary against developers to prevent the occurrence of nuisances. A “nuisance” is defined as the effect from an activity on others which unreasonably interferes with another’s lawful use of property, or causes undue inconvenience, hardship, or discomfort to another person. Examples aren’t hard to [...]

Real estate developers have good reason to feel cannibalized when they attempt to develop something today. Building permits for their projects are often exceedingly difficult to secure, requiring thousands of dollars in architect’s and attorney’s fees, and months (if not years) of submitting plans to boards and commissions, sometimes a repeat number of times. Many [...]

While all these programs differed in their specifics, they all started with the identical statist premise: that the free market is inferior to government intervention, which ultimately is derived from the cancerous notion that man should live according to the arbitrary dictates of government officials, rather than according to how his reason judges reality. Consequently [...]

One of the most disfiguring of the four programs ultimately was the Interstate Highway System. The interstates are a national network of limited access highways extending between, and then through, all major American cities. Many of them are the freeways we all know and love so well, labeled with numbers and an “I” before them, [...]

The third of these programs, Urban Renewal, was a federal program started in 1949 with the goal of clearing large slum areas in and around the downtown areas of American towns and cities through the government’s coercive use of eminent domain and replacing the slums with new commercial development. The arbitrary premise behind Urban Renewal [...]