Free Republic

Nearly 200,000 American citizens in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties could lose free use of their private lands and property if the proposed Rim of the Valley National Park converting two national parks becomes law! A continuation of United Nations sponsored, Agenda 21 aims of shoving American citizens into carefully defined clusters of living space around large urban populations, the Rim of the Valley plan would severely affect personal liberty! Urgent action is needed to stop this huge new federal land grab threat says Chuck Cushman of the American Land Right Association. (1) “It will start with a small scope...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog South Africa’s communist redistribution of farmland has been a colossal failure In their 1848 publication Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote: “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”In 2009, the people of South Africa elected communist Jacob Zuma to be their new President. In 2012, Reuters wrote about a black farmer named Koos Mthimkhulu, who was given farmland that the South African government had seized from white farmers.But perhaps “given” is not really an accurate word, as Reuters reports:But Mthimkhulu does...

Here are twelve comical but true resolutions that every liberal should make for 2013: 1.) Resolve to spend time with gun-owners. I have a liberal friend who says she would rather be in the same room as a cobra snake than a gun, even an unloaded gun. Guns really, really scare her. But guns don’t kill. People kill. Whether the tool is a gun or a knife or a baseball bat, unconscionable people kill, not the inanimate objects in their hands. Banning all tools and machinery will not turn bad people into good people. Doing so would make us more...

A New Mexico couple has been warned by the federal government not to touch trash – tin cans, broken glass and the like – that has accumulated over the years on the 20 acres of desert land they bought for their retirement home near Santa Fe because it could hurt the Rio Grande River, 25 miles away. Huh? The dispute over the Obama administration’s claim to jurisdiction over desert land belonging to Peter and Francoise Smith is heading to court now. Their lawsuit alleges Washington is over-reaching in its claim that their land, which does not contain any “relatively permanent,...

<p>At an oceanfront park in Long Branch, N.J., Tim Dillingham looks out over the beach in awe of how much the pounding waves and high waters of Hurricane Sandy have changed the Jersey shore.</p> <p>Dillingham is the executive director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal conservation group. Before the storm, he says, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent years building up the beaches by pumping sand onto them.</p>

The great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property. — John Locke When Christian employers protested the new federal rule that they provide insurance for services that violate their consciences, the most horrifying thing was the solution. President Obama assumed that Americans would accept his bullying of insurance companies if he paused his bullying of churches. And it seems he was correct. For the moment, we still have some freedom of religion, but no "freedom of business." That's not what the Founders called it, of course; this...

When the Pilgrims landed in 1620, they established a system of communal property. Within three years they had scrapped it, instituting private property instead. Hoover media fellow Tom Bethell tells the story. There are three configurations of property rights: state, communal, and private property. Within a family, many goods are in effect communally owned. But when the number of communal members exceeds normal family size, as happens in tribes and communes, serious and intractable problems arise. It becomes costly to police the activities of the members, all of whom are entitled to their share of the total product of the...

Lisa Gansky likes to share, and usually with strangers..... •She leaves her house in Napa, Calif.,at 7:30 a.m. and drives to the ferry, parks her Mini Cooper, and takes the 60-minute ride across the bay to San Francisco. •If it's raining, she'll pull up the RelayRides application on her iPhone and see if someone nearby has a car she can rent to get around that day, usually for less than $10 an hour. If there's nothing available, she'll open the mobile app for Uber and book a ride with a nearby town car sitting idle,waiting for a customer. •Fifteen minutes...

Now, no one gets the discount. A water park in the heart of the Bible Belt is ending the $5-per-person discount it had been offering on its entrance fee to church groups after the head of a secular charity that caters to inner-city youths requested the same deal for its kids. The Willow Springs Water Park in Little Rock, Ark., had been knocking a few dollars off the price of admission for people who came to the park with their church group. The entrance fee was lowered 50 percent to $5 for children who came in that context. However, when...

Two women were ousted from a Kentucky private park because a gatekeeper said same-sex couples were 'not welcomed.' Mrs Miller-Poole told the Richmond Register that she often does portrait sessions in the park and has never had an issue. . .'It was just a peck of a kiss,' Miss Chenault, who is expecting, said to WKYT. Moments after the intimate moment, a gatekeeper told them to leave. 'He said that we had to leave and that it was inappropriate,' Mrs Miller-Poole said. 'The man said,"Those type of people were not welcomed."' The shocked photographer was even told she would be...

Editor's Note: This column was authored by Justice Gilpin-Green Individual rights must take a backseat to community interests. Sound familiar? That’s probably because it’s been the ideology that American presidents have been agreeing to since 1992. Enter Agenda 21, the 40 chapter document from the United Nations that establishes environmental “principles” at local, national, regional, and international levels-and the object of Ayn Rand’s nightmare. Defined these days as “sustainable development,” Agenda 21 seeks to transform humanity with “new global ethics.” At the most basic level, beyond the soft words like “sustainability” and “eco-friendly environments”, Agenda 21 takes away private property...

This week, the universally stupid brainchild of US Senators Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey known as the Ex-PATRIOT Act inched a bit closer towards becoming law. ‘Ex-PATRIOT’ is an absurd acronym that stands for “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy”. I call it the Tax Slave Act… and it proposes three key provisions: 1) Individuals who are deemed, in the sole discretion of the US government, to have renounced US citizenship in order to avoid US taxes, will be permanently barred from re-entering the United States. 2) Such individuals will also be required to pay a 30%...

Meteorologist Brian Sussman blows whistle on president's scheme The environmentalist movement isn’t about protecting the environment at all, according to meteorologist-turned-journalist Brian Sussman. It’s about destroying private property, controlling behavior, and expanding government – and the Obama administration has a secret plan to further all of it, he says. Sussman is now blowing the whistle on the real nature of environmentalism in his explosive brand-new book, “Eco-Tyranny.” He reveals secret memos from inside Obama’s Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, outlining a covert plan “to pursue a program of land consolidation” for the federal government to secure tens of millions...

Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington— The Supreme Court strengthened the rights of property owners who are confronted by federal environmental regulators, ruling Wednesday that landowners are entitled to a hearing to challenge the government's threats to fine them for alleged Clean Water Act violations. The 9-0 decision revolved around procedural matters and did not resolve questions about the reach of the act, which has been the subject of different legal interpretations. But it is a victory for an Idaho couple, Mike and Chantell Sackett, who faced fines of up to $75,000 a day if they didn't restore a small...

Imagine you paid thousands of dollars for a vacant lot where you wanted to build your dream house. The lot is 500 feet from a rural lake, with only a couple of houses between the lot and the lake, with a partial view of the lake. You obtained all the appropriate permits from the county and state, and then — just days after you laid some gravel — the federal government came in and told you that you couldn't build on the land. They then told you that you were subject to a fine of $32,500 per day until you...

Borrowing a page from Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer’s investigation of how elected officials funnel taxpayer dollars to projects that increase the value of properties they own, the Washington Post has conducted a study revealing that 33 members of Congress earmarked more than $300 million for projects within two miles of land they own...

MONTROSE, CO - Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum took a new jab at Newt Gingrich, saying he wants to "endanger" the former Speaker. The dig came during a campaign rally in Montrose, CO., as Santorum railed against the federal government's environmental regulations. "These are your lands! Oh but they always say we're doing it for your benefit," Santorum decried. "We'll make sure that you don't do something to scar the land or you don't do something to endanger a newt. No not that Newt, different newt. I want to endanger that Newt - that's a different story." The line drew...

(Excerpt) Glendening, who has long been a smart growth advocate, said the tension has resulted from the traditional reliance on local decision making and concepts of private property."That worked fine for several hundred years," Glendening, who was governor from 1995 to 2003, said.

About a month ago, I posted in regard to what I called “the euthanasia of the saver.” This comment had to do with the fact that nominal interest rates in the United States for financial investments such as bank certificates of deposit and bank savings accounts—the kinds of investments traditionally employed by retired persons and small savers, who wish to gain income without exposing their funds to great risk of capital loss—now fall considerably below the rate of inflation, and hence the real (or inflation-adjusted) yield on such investments is negative. That is, the nominal payoff is insufficient to offset...

Cuba announced Thursday it will allow real estate to be bought and sold for the first time since the early days of the revolution, the most important reform yet in a series of free-market changes under President Raul Castro. The law, which takes effect Nov. 10, applies to citizens living in Cuba and permanent residents only, according to a red-letter headline on the front page of Thursday's Communist Party daily Granma and details published in the government's Official Gazette. The law limits Cubans to owning one home in the city and another in the country, an effort to prevent the...