Sunday, December 13, 2009 6:48 pm | By Kelsey Zahourek
Quin Hillyer highlights in today’s Washington Times six areas where property rights have come under attack. Among these is the Clean Water Restoration Act which would result in an unprecedented expansion of the regulatory authority of the federal government. This piece of legislation leaves all property owners vulnerable granting the federal government the power to regulate all interstate and intrastate waters, including non-navigable waters.
Wilderness "Protection" is Property Rights Infringement
Sunday, December 13, 2009 4:51 pm | By Sam Leverenz
It would appear that plans are moving ahead for the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Preservation Act (NREPA). NREPA is just the next step in a string of government actions and programs that fly in the face of property rights. This act, currently waiting in the House Natural Resources Committee, would reclassify 24 million acres of land in the Western United States as wilderness.
Designating federal land as wilderness effectively amounts to a land grab. Originally conceived to preserve lands unmarred by human hands, wilderness status is now used as a tool to block desirable land from energy development, oil exploration, cattle grazing, hunting, farming, mountain biking, and every other form of use and recreation. By restricting access to land for exploration, this legislation is limiting the potential of the economy and directly interfering with America’s entrepreneurial drive.
According to the Republican members of the Natural Resources Committee, almost 1,700 jobs would be jeopardized by passage of this bill. This fact should not come entirely as a surprise considering that none of the sponsors of NREPA represent districts that would be affected by it. The Federal government owns 650 million acres of land. Over one hundred million of those acres are now regulated as wilderness. 2009 has seen several assaults on property rights at the Federal level. On top of the Clean Water Restoration Act, the last thing that property owners need is more regulation of land use. The Natural Resources Committee surely can spend their time on more worthy causes.
PRA Opposes Dorgan/Snowe/McCain Amendment to Senate Healthcare Legislation
Thursday, December 10, 2009 5:23 am | By Kelsey Zahourek
Soon, the Senate will vote on an amendment (SA 2793) to the Senate healthcare reform bill that would allow for the importation of prescription drugs. For the U.S. Senate to sanction and encourage the importation without consequence of foreign drug products that have not been directly associated with a "normal" FDA approval, by individuals or wholesalers who are not directly licensed by the product's manufacturer or owner, calls into question the U.S. policy regarding protection of intellectual property.
In the realm of property rights this amendment will be extremely damaging. When government steps in and places an artificial price ceiling on drugs, companies face a disincentive to enter the market. If pharmaceutical companies risk having their investments effectively expropriated by the government, future investment and innovation will be hamstrung. Research and development is very expensive, and companies need to have an incentive to keep inventing life-saving drugs.
Without any assurance that intellectual property will be respected and protected, not only drug makers, but other companies as well, will avoid investing in developing new products since they risk having their investments effectively expropriated by the government. Americans have seen this type of expropriation before with respect to physical property rights (e.g. eminent domain of homes and land).
The United States is a global leader in pharmaceutical and biotech research, due to a combination of reliable patent laws and the freedom of companies to engage in market pricing. America benefits from hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries and hundreds of thousands of well paying, highly skilled jobs in those industries. If the United States government began to make its intellectual property policies inconsistent and arbitrary (by adjusting those to accommodate short-term political pressures) these jobs and investments would be jeopardized.
Click here to read the legislative alert
