Forum Post: Can the government tell you how big your house has to be?

Hair shirts. Self flagellation. Windows system recovery. There are many ways across the ages in which people have chosen to punish themselves, and I suppose "Huckabee" on Fox News is not the worst. But achh, there are times.

Huckabee delivered a great, stirring speech about the importance of ownership for FREEDOM. That because we can own things, the government can't tell us what to do, like how many rooms our houses can have.

And of course, it's true ... if you're rich. A rich person like Huckabee can have a big house or a gy-normous one, and no one can say a thing about it.

But for the poor, rules and regulations on the size of home ownership and the number of people who can live in a house are universal. Trailer parks are not merely derided for bad taste - they're practically forbidden. Houses in many neighborhoods have to meet specific requirements on size and construction to drive up the cost. Such restrictions are not incidental; they are the most crucial laws in America. You could repeal free speech tomorrow, and a few of us civil libertarians would care - the normal people punch a clock and have to worry that if an Obama sticker is spied on their bumper in the employee lot that they will be fired without appeal. You could abolish Congress and who would be the wiser? But allow homeless people to register their kids for school under the wrong address? Never! Allow poor couples to join up and rent houses together in rich neighborhoods, flood the well-to-do districts with a lemming wave of their spawn - it would be raw and utter chaos! Banning people from owning a home of the wrong size or shape or description is the most fundamental thing Americans believe in.

Ownership is the basis of rights, sure --- for those who can afford them.