Measure 49 backers are continuing their victory dance today. And, why not? They won. But property owners in Oregon lost. They may be in the minority but property owners still have rights:

…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

You may remember this part of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution; it comes right after the part about being a witness against yourself.
Measure 37 added teeth behind this and Oregon’s law by requiring a time limit and the end of unreasonable takings of people’s property. This has all but gone away with M 49. By passing it, the voters have ceded other people’s property rights to the state and the central planners.
Randal O’Toole, an Oregonian and Cato Institute Senior Fellow, has just come out with a must read book for every Oregonian and Washingtonian, “The Best Laid Plans, How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook and Your Future.

Today he published an open letter to popular Portland blogger Jack Bogdanski to express how this tax professor and influential blogger’s backing of M 49 harmed Oregonians’ rights and how he bears some responsibility for misleading them. Here’s where you can find the letter. The following are some particularly on point observations from the letter:

If we treated any of the other freedoms the way we treat property rights — saying, for example, that you can print anything you want as long as the government censors no more than 90 percent of it or that you can worship in any of the 10 percent of churches approved by the government — there would be a revolt. But for some reason, the Supreme Court has decided that property rights don’t merit the same protection as other rights, and you and 61 percent of other Oregon voters apparently agree.

I don’t expect to change your mind. But the next time you criticize the PDC for subsidizing some condo tower, the next time you fret over a high-cost streetcar line, the next time you chortle over some inanity committed by Portland’s city council, I hope you feel a pang of guilt. Because you had a choice, and you chose density, congestion, and subsidies over freedom and property rights.