Planning Permission is Bullshit
In another typical case of government destroying productivity and trampling on property rights, farmer Robert Fidler of Surrey has lost a high court bid to save his home from being demolished.
After being denied “planning permission” Fidler went ahead and built his home (a beautiful construction, complete with castle turrets and a grand central hallway) anyway. He hid the construction from the bureaucrats by piling straw bales around the property, he then lived in the property for 4 years before removing the bales. The plan was to use a loophole in the law that says if you have lived in your property for 4 years without anyone objecting, it is no longer subject to planning enforcement.
But the trouble with fighting the government with sneaky legal loopholes is that they are always going to be better at that game than you are. Why? Because they make up the rules!
But in March 2007 the borough council issued an enforcement notice, which was upheld by a Government planning inspector in May 2008.
The inspector ruled that the removal of the straw bales constituted part of the building works and the four-year immunity rule would not apply.
Unbelievable!
And does anybody believe the judges in this country rule impartially and in the benefit of the public? In fact the judges will almost always side with their employer: the state. Lest anyone get any ideas that it might be a good idea to work around laws that punish construction and productivity. Deputy High Court judge Sir Thayne Forbes:
In my view, the inspector’s findings of fact make it abundantly clear that the erection/removal of the straw bales was an integral – indeed an essential – fundamentally related part of the building operations that were intended to deceive the local planning authority and to achieve by deception lawful status for a dwelling built in breach of planning control.
Just for once it would be amazing if a judge took a 2 second glance at photographs of the property and instantly ruled “What a lovely home. Did you build it on your property? Oh you did? Then case dismissed.”
I can dream right?
In this country nobody actually owns their property, just like nobody actually owns their body. In a moral sense, we should, but for practical purposes, we don’t.
For the same reasons that if we really owned our own bodies we’d be allowed to choose what substances we put into it, so long as we didn’t harm anybody else, if we really owned our own land then we’d be allowed to choose what we built on that land, so long as we didn’t infringe on anybody else’s property rights. But instead we must fear imprisonment, harassment, and the destruction of our own homes if we don’t first get permission from the parasitical, power-hungry, runt politicians:
February 7th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
OK, I can sort of see your point in this particular case. But I can’t accept the denunciation of planning permission in general. What if, say, my neighbour decides to change his house into a place of business. Let’s suppose it is to repair cars. Pretty soon my ‘quite enjoyment’ of my property is shot because of a constant stream of his customers at all hours. He continues to work on the cars late into the evening disrupting my sleep. What is my remedy in an anarcho-capitalist society? He needs no one’s permission to change the usage of the house. Do I retaliate? Do I move? Do I sue? Can I sue as there will be no expressed or implied contract between us as to usage of the house? And whose law do I use as the private law he subscribes to may permit what he is doing to happen. Do I take my pistol – for which of course I do not need a licence – and shoot him in the head?
February 8th, 2010 at 7:34 am
Again, what do I do in the current situation where planning permission is granted because of political pull rather than property rights. You don’t solve the problem with the state, you just change the types of people who can build.
Now, you can build on your property so long as you don’t infringe on the property rights of others. Pollution that spills onto a neighbours property is definitely a property rights violation and I would argue Noise is certainly a form of pollution if it infringes on your ability to sleep, or enjoy your life.
How do we decide at what level of noise is appropriate? Well I would argue that you would homestead the accepted noise levels much like how you homestead property. The libertarian theory of property homesteading says that the first person to do something with a piece of land owns that land, until they voluntarily abandon it or transfer it to somebody else. I believe the same would be true of noise, if a bunch of people build a housing estate and live there a while at one noise level, then you come along and build a nightclub right next to us then I think we have recourse against you. However if it’s the other way around and I build a loud nightclub then you come along and built a housing estate next to me then you have no expectation of quiet as I was there first.
In this way the market will almost certainly allocate certain areas for business, other areas for clubbing and quieter areas for housing, because that is what people will want. However because it’s not centrally planned enforcement, you won’t get stupid things going on, like not being able to build a convenience store next to a housing estate, which would actually be USEFUL for people, and you won’t get rural farmers being denied the ability to build a family home etc.
February 8th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Again, what do I do in the current situation where planning permission is granted because of political pull rather than property rights
You go after the politicians in the next election.
Now, you can build on your property so long as you don’t infringe on the property rights of others
Which is one of the reasons for planning permission.
if a bunch of people build a housing estate and live there a while at one noise level, then you come along and build a nightclub right next to us then I think we have recourse against you
All fine and dandy but how exactly is this recourse to be taken? If you are to turn that principle you’ve just stated into law then you need an authority to enforce it and you’ve just created a proto-state.
In this way the market will almost certainly allocate certain areas for business, other areas for clubbing and quieter areas for housing, because that is what people will want
You haven’t answered my question. What recourse is open to me in the anarcho-capitalist society against my hypothetical neighbour? It is clear what my recourse is in our present society. I complain the the planning authorities. They confirm that he hasn’t planning permission and they close him down. If he tries to get planning permission in the first place, I will raise objections and he probably won’t get it.
February 8th, 2010 at 11:58 am
In a free market arbitration will be done by private entities. I know you’re playing dumb here cause I’ve explained this to you in the past and linked to several videos that explain it also. Fair enough if you disagree but argue why you disagree, don’t go back 10 steps and pretend you don’t know what it is we believe. Again, here is one of the videos I’ve pointed to before:
The stateless west
If you’re genuinely interested, here’s some more information
An anarchist legal order
The stateless society: an examination of alternatives
A question for you: If centrally planned authority is the best way to work out who builds where, I presume you’re for a world government?
February 8th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
In a free market arbitration will be done by private entities. I know you’re playing dumb here cause I’ve explained this to you in the past and linked to several videos that explain it also
I am not playing ‘dumb’ and neither am I stupid. I am asking a reasonable question. If your response is for to read up on anarcho-capitalist theory, then frankly I am not interested in investing that amount of time in it on just your say-so. If you can’t or won’t mediate all that theory into succinct answers for the curious, then you are simply going to remain an intellectual cult of true believers. Fine, if that’s what you want. It’s your blog and I have no right to demand anything of you. But you can hardly complain thereafter if people have little sympathy or understanding of libertarian alternatives to our present society.
Fair enough if you disagree but argue why you disagree
When you answer the specifics of my question, as to what recourse I would have in such a situation, then how can I say whether I disagree or not? Being told that ‘arbitration’ will be done by private entities, tells me nothing. What sanctions exist should my neighbour continue to make life difficult for me? Suppose he refuses to engage in arbitration, what then?
February 8th, 2010 at 1:11 pm
I said “playing” dumb not that you are dumb.
There are lots of videos and literature on how private arbitration might look in a free market, I can’t answer you in succinct ways because you’ll just come back with another specific situation, and specific situations are limitless. For example:
In this housing situation, the guy who builds the garage next to you bought the property, he needs to buy food, get contracts, live amongst people, therefore he will have natural incentives to show people he’s not a criminal outlaw, the way to prove this in a free market is to commit beforehand to peaceful arbitration in the case of a dispute, and thus companies to provide this service will pop up.
But this is just one answer to one particular question, and it’s not an exact answer because I am just one person, the market will discover the best answers to these questions, if I knew every exact answer it would be an argument for central planning, but nobody is smart enough to solve every problem in the world, that would be an issue for those involved locally.
Because these scenarios are limitless you can just go “Yea but what if somebody builds an airport next to your house” and then I gotta spend ages trying to imagine how that might get resolved and it goes on forever.
If you read the THEORY behind private law and justice then you will be able to start getting a feel for how the market might deal with certain scenarios.
It’s like trying to argue evolution with a creationist by explaining how each individual thing evolved. So I might say “Yeah the eagles wings grew that big because over time those eagles with bigger wings were able to fend off the smaller eagles and pass on their genes” and then the creationist goes “Yeah but what about the eagles beak” and it can go on forever. A better thing to do, if the creationist is genuinely curious and not just looking for an avenue to show how he’s right and you’re wrong, would be to read or listen to a few things about evolutionary THEORY so that he can see things from that paradigm and be able to think of ways things might have evolved without even asking. But if the creationist isn’t interested in doing that he won’t look for those books because it’s much easier to just derail debates by arguing over endless specifics.
Let’s imagine a world where the government is in the business of all footwear production and distribution. I’m running this same blog and argue the market could provide shoes at lower cost and of better quality and of a greater variety. Somebody who disagrees comes on here and starts going on:
“What about poor people in your utopian system? How would they get shoes?”
“You’d have mothers and children running around bear feet, in bad neighbourhoods they could stand on used drug vials and catch diseases”
“What if rich people just started charging ridiculous prices? Everybody needs shoes so they could exploit the poor by charing £200 a pair”
“Private companies only care about profit so the shoes would just fall apart so people were forced to buy more and more shoes”
Etc. etc. etc. etc. Its’ endless. The libertarian view of the world is that initiating violence against your neighbour is wrong, it’s immoral, we take that premise and look to see how problems can be resolved peacefully by free individuals without resorting to mafia style extortion and one-size-fits-all top down forced solutions. We’d say “I don’t know exactly how the market will deal with shoe production, but I know that things will be fine, because people want shoes, so the market will provide them. Secondly, we know that people getting shoes peacefully and voluntarily is better than having one group of people violently stealing money from everybody taking a cut, wasting some of the money, and then redistributing that money back out in the form of its own centrally planned footwear.” But how could we give an exact answer? It would be impossible, literally hundreds of thousands of people cooperate peacefully to bring the various shoes to the market around the world, there is no one answer!
February 8th, 2010 at 10:57 pm
[...] Feb.08, 2010 in Economics, Philosophy, Quick posts, VOTD, Videos There was some discussion on the Planning permission is bullshit article about private law & courts. This video by Ryan Faulk is an excellent introduction to [...]
February 9th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Sadly, these kinds of cases are far too common. There was a case last year which involved the closing of a daycare that had operated for a few years without obtaining a change of use. (And changes of use are very hard to get.Most people are refused them.)
And ‘Eminent Domain’ laws should be adequate proof for anyone that no one really owns their property.