California’s Road to Serfdom

Several years ago, California brothers Arron and Arthur Benedetti inherited 267 acres of farmland from their father, a turkey farmer who spent his life working that land. They were not asking for a subsidy, tax break, or any government benefit. They simply wanted to build a home on property they had lawfully inherited. The government of Marin County, however, took it upon itself to say that the brothers could have their permit, but only if they signed a covenant permanently committing the land to commercial agricultural use, farming it themselves, or contracting it out in perpetuity.

The result is a trap with three exits, none of them acceptable: sell the land, farm it commercially, or sit on it and do nothing. Even though the brothers have a strong incentive to take good care of the land they own, building a home and living on what their father built is, apparently, not among the options Marin County is prepared to allow. Now, with a petition before the Supreme Court, the Benedetti brothers, two plumbers who have resided in California their entire lives, are asking the nation’s highest court to affirm a freedom the rest of the Western world has long held dear. Their case is not merely about a building permit or a zoning dispute, but whether the government may use its regulatory leverage to conscript private citizens into occupations of its choosing, and whether property rights in America retain any real meaning at all.

Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that the path to tyranny is rarely dramatic. It does not typically announce itself with jackboots and seizures, but arrives quietly, incrementally, through the accumulated weight of regulatory conditions that strip individuals of the freedom to direct their own lives and labor. It may start as small as a permit denial, and before long the citizen finds himself not the master of his property but its captive, working it as the state commands, or not at all. Marin County, California, has offered a case study in exactly this dynamic, and the Supreme Court now can say, clearly and finally, that this is not how American property law works.

When Americans want to modify their property, they must first ask permission from the state. That requirement may sound innocuous, but it gives local government the power to withhold the permit until the owner surrenders something the government wants but cannot legally demand outright. Marin County pulled that lever here, in direct defiance of controlling precedent.