Spoiled Brat Politics: Part II -- Thomas Sowell -- Stanford/Hoover Inst ,dik4=GOPUSA

The reason there is a legal issue is that a federal law has been passed, saying that colleges and universities that forbid military recruiters from coming on campus are no longer eligible to receive federal money.

Academics are outraged. They see this law as a violation of their freedom -- including their right to violate their students' freedom. It is classic spoiled brat politics, based on the idea that what I want overrides what you want.

The same principle underlies growing legal restrictions on building anything that existing residents in a community don't want built.

A young "planning consultant" to a local politician in New York says: "These neighborhoods substantially have not changed in 40 years. What we are trying to do is make sure they are recognizable 40 years from now. I don't think there is anything wrong with that. In fact, in many other places in the country, that is celebrated. So why shouldn't we celebrate it here?"

n other words, local voters and local politicians could not arbitrarily deprive other people of the right to come in and buy and use property as they saw fit, simply because some planning consultants or planning commissions preferred that they do otherwise. But Constitutional protection of property rights is no longer "in the mainstream" of fashionable legal thinking.

Let's go back to square one. The people who bought homes in a neighborhood 40 years ago did not buy the neighborhood, nor did they pay for a guarantee that the neighborhood would stay the same for 40 years, much less in perpetuity.

The only way the government can give current residents such a guarantee is to take away other people's property rights, which exist precisely in order to keep politicians at bay.

Buying a chance and asking the government to turn that chance into a guarantee has become a common occurrence under spoiled brat politics.

When you buy a home with a great view of the ocean, you do not pay for a guarantee that nothing will ever be built between you and the ocean. You ask politicians to give that to you, at someone else's expense

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.