Is the county’s new land use plan socialism? Maybe.
However, my Economic Dictionary describes communism as government confiscation and control of the means of production, including property rights. The county says the new land use plan will allow landowners to know, up front, what they can do with their land.
In straight-talk, it means the county can blatantly confiscate all, repeat all, your property rights (with exceptions, as for example, locations where the federal government has already retained mineral rights of homesteaded land) and then grudgingly return some.
Most privately held lands here went from the federal government to landowners through a homestead, grant or patented claim, and nowhere did that process, or does it now, first transfer property rights to the county to subsequently and selectively dole them out to the community.
And, of course, an expanded bureaucracy will be required to oversee, with added cost, the excruciatingly detailed new oversight system, which, as proposed, will even govern what kind of fence you can construct, where you can put it and on which side of the posts to put the wire.
Some degree of socialism is acceptable to help the unfortunate and less capable, and some degree of authority is necessary to protect the health and safety of the general public. But blatant communism?
Is it too much to ask for positive planning and incentives instead of just negative zoning which only divides the community and generates animosity?
Jim Hanks
Durango
