California City Extorts Property Owners and Hurts the Poor

This short video from the Pacific Legal Foundation details an attempt by government — in this case, that of the city of Palo Alto, CA —to extort money on a grand scale from innocent people.

Below the video is my summary of the events.

1) Peaceful, entrepreneurial people start a successful business, one that makes affordable housing more available than it would otherwise be in Palo Alto;

(2) these entrepreneurs, using their own funds, have for nearly 30 years done far more than almost anyone else on the planet to make it possible for people of modest means to live in Palo Alto;

(3) meanwhile, other people — those assembled into an organization called "government," along with those who are especially influential with those people so assembled — have consistently used threats of violence to artificially obstruct the growth of the housing stock in Palo Alto and, thus, have done far more than almost anyone else on the planet to make it difficult for people of modest means to live in Palo Alto;

(4) now that the peaceful entrepreneurs seek to change the manner in which they use their own property (that is, they want to go into another peaceful line of business), they are prevented by government from doing so unless these entrepreneurs first pay a fee extorted from them by the government — a fee to be used, ostensibly, to help address the problem of a severe lack of low-cost housing in Palo Alto, so

(5) those people who have been especially active at artificially reducing Palo Alto’s supply of housing for low-income people are — under the pretense of being great champions of low-income people seeking housing in Palo Alto! — now unjustly (and unconstitutionally) penalizing other people (those who, again, have actually worked hard over the years to make low-income housing more available) for now moving into another line of work.

http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/california-city-extorts-property-owners-and-hurts-the-poor/

Statist FILTH!

hangnoose

California City Extorts Property Owners and Hurts the Poor

California City Extorts Property Owners and Hurts the Poor

Anarcho-Capitalist Categorical Imperatives

AnCaps' Laissez-faire Free Trade Zone