(Note: Since this article was published, the Halpers have continued to fight the threat of eminent domain being used against their farm. The city council has said, off the record -- that it has no use for the land and will sell it for development -- and the Farm Bureau and the Halper's attorney seem to be twiddling their thumbs as the December 2, 2002, date for the judge to 'render his decision' fast approaches.)

February 20, 2001

By Joseph Farah

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© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com

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Larry Halper is the last farmer in Piscataway, N.J., And he's learning that's not an enviable role.

Halper grows pumpkins on a 75-acre plot in the nation's most densely populated state.

He's been offered, he says, up to $20 million by developers who would like to turn his little farm into an industrial park or a housing development.

He turned them down flat. He's a third-generation farmer and he doesn't want to sell the farm out from under his 79-year-old mother and 80-year-old aunt.

You might think government officials, so concerned with preserving open spaces and greenbelts, would be pleased with his decision. They're not.

In fact, local officials are trying to force Halper, through eminent domain, to sell his land to them for less than a fifth of what private developers offered.

That's what the idea of "property rights" has come to mean in 2001. Your property really doesn't belong to you -- it's kind of on loan from the government, which can call in that loan at its price any time it damn well pleases.

Let me tell you something, folks. If Larry Halper doesn't own his property and doesn't have the right to do with it as he pleases, none of us do. You don't have any rights over your home, your car, your children or even your ideas. They are all just on loan from the government.

Larry Halper's plight is by no means an isolated one. He's facing the same predicament as thousands of others across the country who are coming to learn that "life, liberty and pursuit of property" just doesn't mean the same thing it once meant in America.

I've been trying to wake up Americans to the threat they face since 1996, when I wrote "This Land Is Our Land," with Rep. Richard Pombo of California.

My main thought with that work was to show people that property rights isn't just a concern of farmers and ranchers or big landowners out West. Property rights are the essential freedoms upon which all of our individual liberties are based.

Did you know that the founding fathers believed that freedom of speech and freedom of the press descended from the concept of property rights?

That's right. It is because we own our ideas and our conscience that we have the right to use them. The state no more controls our land -- at least it's not supposed to -- than it may control our thoughts. Once we as a people yield our God-given property rights to government, or accept that they are actually privileges and not birthrights -- then we have not a leg to stand on in defending our free speech rights.

"But, Farah," you say, "we have a First Amendment that protects freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. How could they be attacked by government?"

Well, my friends, you might note we also have a Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures of their property, as well. Yet, that is happening -- every day in America today. We also, you might note, have a Second Amendment to the Constitution, which, unequivocally protects our right -- nay, our duty -- as citizens to bear arms. How many laws do we have on the books in Washington today that infringe upon that God-given unalienable right?

But it's hardly just Washington that is attacking property rights. The states are doing it. Local communities are doing it. And these attacks must be addressed by freedom-loving people before the masses accept the idea that government, at whatever level, is in control of everything.

Too many Americans are fat and lazy and ready to roll over any time a government agency tells them to do so. They've become conditioned to believe that government is there to be their helper, their nanny, their parent.

Government, instead, my friends, is the gravest threat to your freedom. It always has been and it always will be. It's the only force on Earth that can legally steal everything from you -- your home, your property, your kids.

It's time to take government back -- get it under control, force it to live under strict limits of authority and preserve freedom for future generations.

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