Private Property Confiscation

Americans traditionally understood that what they owned was theirs, not the government’s. Yet, over the last century, that principle has steadily eroded—from gold confiscation to civil asset forfeiture to proposed wealth taxes. The emerging principle is stark: Your property is yours only to the extent that the State allows you to keep it.Preliminarily, what does it mean to own something? In America, the traditional answer was straightforward: it meant that the property was yours—not the government’s—and that the State had no claim to it unless you forfeited it through a criminal act or the government seized it through eminent domain...