My view on Mayor Ireton's Legislative Package Part 7

This is the least controversial piece of legislation.  This is just an informational sheet that would require each tenant to receive and sign at the same time they sign a rental or lease agreement.  I was expecting a little more with this from all the hype about it.  I certainly do not have a problem with this.

Tenants' Rights Information Sheet

My view on Mayor Ireton's Legislative Package Part 6

The repeated Calls for Service Ordinance
My biggest concern with this legislation is people being presumed guilty due to a verified call for service.  Sometimes issues arise, they are out of your control and the police are called.  This should not be counted against a law abiding citizen.  

I do feel it should be focused on criminal activity that is accompanied by a conviction.  Also, civil citation convictions for loud noise should be included.

I think this is a good start, I just disagree with the guilty until proven innocent attitude.

Below is the link for this legislation.
Repeated Calls for Service Ordinance

My view on Mayor Ireton's Legislative Package Part 5

This legislation is giving NSCC the authority to inspect properties and are using the term area searches.  This language is very interesting and the authority here seems to be very broad.  There is no mention of giving the property owner or manager advance notice upon entering a property.  There is no mention of giving the tenant or individual occupying the residence advance notice.  

If this is the case, are there going to be accompanying search warrants?  Will the police be escorting the NSCC officers on these searches?  Does this include owner occupied residences as well?  These are very important questions and the grayness of the language brings forth many concerns for privacy and liberty. 

Periodic Area Search 

My view on Mayor Ireton's Legislative Package Part 4

This the second most controversial piece of legislation.  

My whole issue with these code violations is the fact that an issuance of the violation acts as a conviction.  So that when you go for an appeal you have essentially already been convicted and are considered guilty.  You must now prove your innocence as the burden of proof is on you. 

I am not for this legislation, as I believe all burden of proof must be on the government or the one accusing you.  I also believe all should be considered innocent until proven guilty.

My view on Mayor Ireton's Legislative Package Part 3

Equitable Relief for Prostitution Actions  This is the link for this piece of legislation.

I believe this is a good piece of legislation and I support it.  Prostitution is a real problem that needs to be addressed and this legislation will provide that to law enforcement and NSCC to address those properties that knowingly allow this activity.

My view on Mayor Ireton's Legislative Package Part 2

I only have few a issues with this piece of legislation.  Mainly the loose determination of at or near the residence.  It is to vague because anybody could be near their cousin's house committing a crime, do we hold the person accountable who did not commit the crime or did not have knowledge.  It is a little to gray. 

Certainly if a place of residence is being used for criminal activity landlords need laws that help them get those people out quickly.  My concern is the use of "verified call for service" and that "a criminal conviction is not required to be in breach" is very shaky ground.  What if the individual has been falsely accused and it takes a year for them to go through the legal system?  In the process they get evicted and then the city could be potentially liable because of the law that was passed.  

That is my concern with the wording in this piece of legislation.  I think this is a good tool for landlords and property managers to remove people from their properties that engage in criminal activity.  It also needs to have protections in it for people who are found not guilty and/or people who are falsely accused.

Wisdom from Madison

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries. "

James Madison

My view on Mayor Ireton's Legislative Package Part 1

I will go through Mayor Ireton's Neighborhood Legislative Package focusing on each piece one by one, offering my opinions.  I will begin with the most controversial issue.  My writing will be in blue, underlining is for items I am emphasizing concern.

Amortization Provision Eliminating Lawful Nonconforming Uses 

This legislation is intended  "TO ELIMINATE UNLAWFUL NONCONFORMING MULTIFAMILY DWELLINGS, CREATE AN AMORTIZATION PROVISION ELIMINATING LAWFUL NONCONFORMING USES THAT EXIST DUE TO THE CONVERSION OF SINGLE-FAMILY DWELLINGS TO MULTIFAMILY DWELLINGS, AND ALLOW PROPERTY OWNERS TO RECOUP THEIR INVESTMENTS."  The ultimate goal of this legislation is simply to take neighborhoods that have had high conversion rates of Single Family homes into Multi-Family Units and reverse those homes back to Single Family homes.  As we go through some sections of this legislation, I will share some of my concerns.

Remember these next two paragraphs, which are explaining part of the reasoning behind this legislation.

WHEREAS, the Mayor and Council recognize that the City of Salisbury’s records concerning zoning enforcement do not always provide sufficient data to determine the scope of conversions to unlawful multifamily uses and, in many cases, there exists no adequate means of determining which residences have been unlawfully converted to multifamily residential use subject to prosecution under the zoning ordinance;

WHEREAS, the Mayor and Council have determined that it is difficult for enforcement officials to ascertain which residences located in a single-family zone are lawful uses, unlawful uses, or lawful nonconforming uses and that attempting to enforce the zoning code on a case-by-case basis in this context would place an undue burden on the taxpayer;  It is important to understand their admittance of the difficulty of the government's inability to prove if a property is nonconforming.

Taking Economic Liberty Seriously

Does the Constitution protect the right to earn a living?

Damon W. Root | August 26, 2010

On March 5, 1934, the U.S. Supreme Court declared New York shopkeeper Leo Nebbia to be a criminal because he sold two quarts of milk and a 5 cent loaf of bread for the combined low price of 18 cents. As Justice Owen Roberts explained in his 5-4 majority opinion in Nebbia v. New York, the state’s Milk Control Board had fixed the minimum price of milk at 9 cents a quart to eliminate the “evils” of price-cutting.

As for the constitutionality of this action, which raised the price of milk during the lean years of the Great Depression in an effort to boost the profits of New York dairy farmers, while doing absolutely nothing to improve the health or safety of the milk-drinking public, Roberts simply shrugged. “A state is free to adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote public welfare, and to enforce that policy by legislation adapted to its purpose." Furthermore, “If the laws passed are seen to have a reasonable relation to a proper legislative purpose, and are neither arbitrary nor discriminatory, the requirements of due process are satisfied.” In other words, when it came to economic regulations, the courts needed only to rubber stamp whatever the lawmakers deemed “reasonable.”

Read more Reason

Ron Paul, former LP Presidential candidate, supports property rights of Islamic cultural Center supporters

posted by Mark Hinkle on Aug 23, 2010

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20014453-503544.html 

Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul is breaking with many of his fellow Republicans - among them his son Rand - to support the creation of the planned Islamic cultural center near the former site of the World Trade Center that has come to be known as the "ground zero mosque."  

In a statement decrying "demagogy" around the issue, the former Republican presidential candidate wrote late last week that "the debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque." 

 "Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be 'sensitive' requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from 'ground zero,'" Paul continues.   

 He goes on to argue that "the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia...never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars."

The Real Costs Of Social Security

by James A. Dorn

This article appeared in Investor's Business Daily on August 20, 2010.

When President Obama told the nation last week that Social Security could be put on a sound basis with minor changes, he forgot to tell Americans about the real costs of that system.

Initially, the costs were low: The combined payroll tax rate was only 2% on a wage base of up to $3,000, for a maximum tax of $60 per year. Although the tax was legally split between workers and employers, the incidence of the tax (the effective burden) has always been on workers in terms of lower net wage rates.

Today, workers pay an effective payroll tax of 12.4% for Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance on earnings up to $106,800, for a maximum tax of $13,243.20 a year. That tax rate and the cap will continue to increase as the number of retirees grows relative to the working population.

Read the rest at Cato.org.

James Dorn is vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and editor of the Cato Journal.

Thoughts from Eric O'Keefe

"Both parties have honorable histories of defending the Constitution and standing for liberty.  Both parties have walked away from that."

Eric O'Keefe

Wisdom from Madison

"Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations."

James Madison

Wisdom from Madison

"Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."

James Madison

Q&A: Does Mark support the Downsize DC Agenda for government reform?

Date: Mon, 08/23/2010
Author: Mark Grannis
Yes. For those that aren’t familiar with it, DownsizeDC.org is a great website to visit and a great organization to support. Their particular excellence, it seems to me, is their ability to translate libertarian ideals into concrete pieces of legislation that would improve the way Congress operates. Here, for example, are the six items they have highlighted for their Downsize DC Agenda:

The “Read the Bills Act”: The “Read the Bills Act,” or RTBA, would require all bills to be posted on the Internet for seven days prior to any vote so that citizens could weigh in on the proposed text. The bills would also have to be read orally in the presence of a quorum in the House and the Senate. Perhaps more importantly, however, the RTBA would require all members of Congress who intend to vote in favor of any bill to file affidavits certifying that they had actually read it themselves and knew its contents. This would promote public participation in the legislative process, prevent legislators from explaining away votes for unpopular measures with the claim that they didn’t know all the details in the bill, and—just maybe—discourage Congress from writing bills that run to hundreds and even thousands of pages in order to regulate so many unnecessary details of our lives

The “One Subject at a Time Act”: This bill takes aim at a major reason for the existence of so many deeply unpopular laws: the propensity of Congress to bury a few unrelated special favors in the middle of a bill that is supposed to deal with something else entirely. The OSTA would require all bills to address only one subject. Furthermore, all bills would be required to carry a title that describes what is actually in the bill, rather than a misleading, propagandistic title like “PATRIOT Act” or “DISCLOSE Act.”

The “Write the Laws Act”: The WTLA attempts to end Congress’s abdication of its constitutional power to decide what the laws are. In recent years, as evidenced by the recent financial “reform” bill, Congress has passed laws that are little more than general statements of policy accompanied by instructions to various regulatory agencies to write the substantive rules Congress couldn’t be bothered with. This results, necessarily, in government by unelected bureaucrats and unelected judges. It also, quite often, produces the disgraceful spectacle of a Congress that agrees to have a federal law about something without agreeing on what the federal law should say.

The “Free Competition in Currency Act”: Those who are only beginning to learn about libertarianism may be puzzled by the inclusion of this bill, but it addresses one of the most fundamental economic problems we have: the corrosive influence of the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies. Those policies facilitate excessive spending and unnecessary wars by Congress, and are the major cause of economic “bubbles” that wreak so much havoc on our prosperity. The FCCA would end government or quasi-government monopolies on the issuance of coins or currency, so that people would be free to deal in money that could not be arbitrarily drained of its value by government fiat. Although the concept of competing forms of money may be strange to most Americans today, it has been the norm for most of our history as a nation. Historically, and across many different civilizations, gold, silver, and other precious metals have been the commodities used most frequently and most successfully as money, and so the FCCA also prohibits capital gains taxation of transactions in these metals, in order to prevent the government from making them less competitive forms of money in the future. (Readers who want to learn more about these issues should read DownsizeDC.org’s FCCA background page, and may also with to read Murray Rothbard’s excellent introduction to the problem, What Has Government Done to Our Money?)

The “Enumerated Powers Act”: This one is easy. It requires Congress to specify in each bill precisely which enumerated Constitutional power it is exercising. The point, of course, is that there are really not very many enumerated powers that the Constitution gives to Congress. Bank bailouts, gun laws, drug laws, farm subsidies, automobile manufacturing, and free colonoscopies are just some of the many things our founders never intended Congress to have anything to do with. The Enumerated Powers Act would not prevent Congress from twisting and stretching the words of Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution in order to justify all manner of meddling, but it would make members of Congress go on the record with their tortured interpretations so that voters could hold them properly accountable.

The “Fiscal Responsibility Act”: This one is easy, too. It cuts Congressional pay for every year the budget remains in deficit. A one-year deficit costs each member of Congress 5% of his pay. If deficits last for two or more years, the annual cut becomes 10%. Pay is restored to pre-deficit levels only after the budget is restored to balance.

Readers who have explored the other parts of my website know that I also favor some broader reform measures designed to improve Congress’s performance, including fundamental tax reform, term limits, and redistricting reform. But I applaud DownsizeDC.org’s efforts to focus on these six specific pieces of legislation, and I support them all.

Washington's Wisdom

"Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."

George Washington

Wisdom from Washington

"The blessed Religion revealed in the word of God will remain an eternal and awful monument to prove that the best Institution may be abused by human depravity; and that they may even, in some instances be made subservient to the vilest purposes. Should, hereafter, those incited by the lust of power and prompted by the Supineness or venality of their Constituents, overleap the known barriers of this Constitution and violate the unalienable rights of humanity: it will only serve to shew, that no compact among men (however provident in its construction and sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting an inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no Wall of words, that no mound of parchm[en]t can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other."

George Washington, fragments of the Draft First Inaugural Address, April 1789