Scottish politicians are pushing legislation that would sacrifice personal property rights on the altar of “social justice.”
The Telegraph reports:
Landowners’ rights to use their property as they wish are to be watered down for the public good, a senior SNP minister has warned as she unveiled a Left-wing agenda to create a socialist society over the next century.
Aileen McLeod, the Scottish Land Reform Minister, told a conference in Edinburgh that the “core of my approach” is to shift the balance of the law so that the “public interest” is given greater precedence at the expense of “individual’s rights.”
She said the Scottish Government would use its new power over land ownership to push forward “social justice” and tackle inequality as part of a drive to work “towards the kind of society we want to be in the next 50 to 100 years.”
Using power to seize land? That sounds familiar.
As The New American has chronicled for years, the U.S. federal government — including the agencies included within the executive branch — has routinely violated one of the most fundamental of Anglo-American rights: property.
From civil asset forfeiture fraud to the showdown in Nevada between the Bureau of Land Management and ranchers determined to defend their right to own, occupy, and use land, the Obama administration has shown that it considers itself above the law and considers personal property rights to be just another anachronism that must be eliminated if the social welfare state is to be solidified in the United States. In Scotland, the story sounds eerily similar:
The minister disclosed that a Land Reform Bill is to be tabled at the Scottish Parliament within the next few weeks, with the measures expected to include a power to force owners to sell their property against their will if they are deemed a barrier to development.
Among the other proposals are scrapping a key tax break for shooting and deer stalking and overhauling the law of succession to increase children’s right to inherit land, which could make it more likely estates and family farms will be broken up. [Emphasis in original.]
That last revelation is nearly identical to the situation in Nevada concerning the family farm owned by Cliven Bundy and ranched by his ancestors for nearly 140 years. Although the Bundy family won a showdown with the federal government, the battle wages on.
And the battle will never end as the statists and social reformers insist on pursuing collectivism and eradicating individual liberty. McLeod made that perfectly clear in a statement supporting her land grab. “In my view, this doesn’t reflect the kind of society to which we in Scotland collectively aspire. Instead I see the Scottish Government’s approach to land reform as one mechanism among others for tackling the causes and the consequences of inequality that blights our society and limits our potential as a country,” McLeod said, as quoted in the Telegraph.
And, as if that wasn’t clear enough, she added, “The task of Government and the core of my approach to land reform is to improve the balance between private and public interest in favour of the latter.”
The approach taken by McLeod sounds suspiciously similar to the goals and guidelines set out in the United Nation’s infamous redistribution plan, Agenda 21.
Agenda 21 would see people robbed of their rights to property and collected into urban areas, with all property being ceded (forcibly) to one or the other government (U.S. or global) agency for the purpose of supporting sustainable development, or, as McLeod would say, land rights should promote “social justice and equality and reflect human rights and the public interest.”
That is a frightening future. As Ron Paul once wrote:
Privacy is the essence of liberty. Without it, individual rights cannot exist. Privacy and property are interlocked. If both were protected, little would need to be said about other civil liberties. If one’s home, church or business is one’s castle, and the privacy of one’s person, papers and effects [is] rigidly protected, all rights desired in a free society will be guaranteed. Diligently protecting the right to privacy and property guarantees religious, journalistic and political experience, as well as a free market economy and sound money. Once a careless attitude emerges with respect to privacy, all other rights are jeopardized.
Perhaps the people of Scotland and the United States should listen less to Aileen McLeod, Barack Obama, and the United Nations and more to John Locke, who wrote concerning property, its relationship to liberty, and the right of a people to protect what is theirs from government:
Whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty. [Emphasis in original.]
