COVID-19 destroyed private property rights

SACRAMENTO >> I don’t pay particular attention to health scares, so when talk of a spreading pandemic started dominating the news cycle

I largely shrugged and went about my business. I was staying at a cheap motel in Calexico, taking photos of the New River and the Salton Sea for my book about

California water policy, when my wife called from Sacramento and said, “You better get home. And I mean now.”

That was the weekend when the shutdowns began. I recall stopping at a grocery store near Modesto, when I noticed meandering lines and a run on toilet paper. The rest, as they say, is history. Like most people, I never could have predicted the coming shutdown of the economy, government orders to stay at home, an end to restaurant dining and public gatherings and profligate “relief” payments.

As that (probably fake)

George Washington quotation put it, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force.” Government officials aren’t wiser than the rest of us, so when they tried to deal with a serious public-health problem, they did so in a forceful, ineloquent and unreasonable manner. Unfortunately, many of its worst approaches leave permanent scars.

In my column last year summarizing lessons from COVID-19, I concluded that it left us as a “nation of rulers, not laws.” American governors — and California Gov. Gavin Newsom in particular — quickly and eagerly used their broad emergency powers to begin issuing edicts. Given the extent of the public-health threat, some of the more modest and temporary ones were understandable, but they bypassed the normal legislative process in cynical and expansive ways.

One Republican lawmaker published a 138-page document detailing the 400 laws that Newsom unilaterally imposed or changed — many of them that only tangentially had anything to do with protecting public health. In particular, officials used the crisis to impose policies they already supported but couldn’t get through the normal legislative process.

The worst example involved anti-eviction orders that have literally destroyed our property rights. Virtually all momand-pop landlords depend on the rental income. With one fell swoop, governors (and the federal Centers for Disease Control) declared that tenants no longer had to pay their full rent if they faced a pandemic-related hardship. Sure, landlords could po