If Your Right Requires the Labor of Another It's Not a Right

Everybody repeat after me, "If the labor of another is required to provide your right then it's not a right." California is looking once again to prove itself as the looniest state in the Union by making home ownership a protected right:

California could ban lender-initiated home foreclosures, under a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution that would make home ownership a fundamental right.

Initiative 11-0014 could appear on the ballot in November 2012, if supporters submit more than 800,000 voter signatures necessary to qualify the measure.

You can read the text of initiative 11-0014 but I think the following piece sums it up:

Makes home ownership fundamental right. Prohibits lenders from foreclosing on California citizen's personal home. Requires lenders to assist California borrowers not paying on home loans due to financial hardship or illness. Requires lenders to reduce home loan principal to reflect drop in local property value i fmore than 10 percent, and to reschedule payments, reduce interest rates, and/or refinance without new credit review. Requires lenders to refinance home loans a t minimum cost within 45 days of request i f loan has been maintained for three years. Provides back property tax assistance to homeowners.

First of all you can't infringe on a right to own property if you don't, you know, own the property. What is proposed is so full of cognitive dissonance that it would make the head of a logical person literally explode if they attempt to make sense of it. First of all if you have a loan on your home then it's not your home. Let's look at what a mortgage is, it's a loan that is backed by real physical property. That is to say you give the title of some property to a person giving out loans and they take it as collateral. When you take out a mortgage you are saying, "I promise to pay back my loan and if I fail to do so I relinquish the ownership of my property to you."

Until you pay back the loan you are not the owner of that property. A mortgage is an exchange of ownerships rights; the entity giving the loan exchanges the right of ownership of a sum of money for the right of ownership of the collateral. Until the loan is paid back with any contractually agreed to interest the entity who gave the loan is the owner of the property. Thus what this initiative proposes is impossible because it's claiming to protect the "right of home ownership" by pissing all over the right of ownership.

That's just one glaring problem with this initiative. The other glaring problem is the fact that it is trying to declare something a right that requires the labor of another to provide. A right to property means you have a right to ownership over legitimately obtained property not a right to be provided property by another. The difference between the two is huge. For instance I can't have a right to own a home unless I can build the entire home myself of materials I can entirely produce myself. If my "right" requires action from another either that right isn't a right or I get to declare select people as slaves. The same logic applies to healthcare, unless you can provide your own healthcare you can't claim a right to it.

If I can homestead or purchase a property, extract the raw resources needed to build a home form that homesteaded of purchased property, refine those materials into a state usable to build a home, and then build a home entirely of those materials by myself then I can claim a right to it. On the other hand a failure to perform any of the following procedures means that I must rely on another to provide a link in the chain of home ownership and thus can declare no right to owning that type of property.

You have no right to owning a home but you do have a right to the ownership of your labor because you are a self-owner. That means you can exchange your labor for a home but you can't demand somebody provide you a home outside of a voluntarily agreed to (by both parties) exchange. That's why a right to ownership of your labor doesn't translate into a right to own specific types of property.

I'm not sure how so much stupid was written on paper. It baffles me that somebody unable to see the cognitive dissonance in this bill is able to read or write.