Background: This is the ninth post in a series on Mark Levin’s inspiring book, The Liberty Amendments. (Click this link to read any of the articles).
My aim is to convey Levin's key messages and encourage participation in the Convention of States (COS) project to restore liberty and self-governance, and to encourage you to read this book. The previous post discussed Levin’s proposed amendment to promote free enterprise by curbing the Commerce Clause's scope-creep and restricting federal regulatory powers over private economic activity. In this chapter, Levin suggests an amendment to ensure private property remains private and used as the owner chooses unless justly compensated.
Levin in Chapter 8 proposes an amendment to fully compensate property owners for losses when any governmental body acts to take their property.
Here is the full text of Levin’s proposed amendment (click the arrow to expand and view):
SECTION 1: When any governmental entity acts not to secure a private property right against actions that injure property owners, but to take property for a public use from a property owner by actual seizure or through regulation, which taking results in a market value reduction of the property, interference with the use of the property, or a financial loss to the property owner exceeding $10,000, the government shall compensate fully said property owner for such losses.
The Framers and Founders understood that the fundamental right to own and maintain private property and the fruits of an individual's physical and intellectual labor, was an essential element in a functioning civil society. This is rooted in the natural rights tradition of luminaries such as John Locke and William Blackstone. These rights must be afforded the highest legal protections. They were enshrined in the The Virginia Declaration of Rights which was a precursor and template for the Declaration of Independence, in the Constitution's Bill of Rights, and in its Fifth Amendment. It states explicitly, ". . . nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation"; known in legal circles as the "Takings Clause". 
In making these points, Levin quotes and cites at length Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Gouverneur Morris, John Adams and George Mason. Despite Federalists and Anti-Federalists debating and disagreeing about many things in the Constitution, there was no divergence about protecting private property which is a natural right, protected by natural law.
Levin describes the debate that has ensued about what constitutes a "taking" of private property by government at any level and by other means such as regulation of property use, and what "just compensation" entails. Sadly, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has increased forms of "takings", and reduced just compensation for We the People. Per Levin:
Today the Supreme Court, endlessly seeking ways to reinforce if not promote the growing powers of the federal government, and especially the extensive and growing tentacles of the administrative state, discounts both the nation’s history and heritage. It has limited severely the factors that constitute a regulatory taking that justify compensating the property owner.
Levin illustrates these increased takings & regulation of use and reduced & inadequate compensation through a wide variety of SCOTUS cases
such as Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon (1922), Penn Central Transp. Co. v. New York City (1978), Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council (1992), Concrete Pipe and Prods. of Cal. v. Constr. Laborers Pension Trust for So. Cal. (1993), and Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A., Inc. (2005). In Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, Levin writes, "even Associate Justice Antonin Scalia indicated that a regulation devaluing a property of 95 percent of its value may not constitute a taking and the property owner would not necessarily be eligible for compensation." It can't get much worse. Levin summarizes:
These tortured rationales and unnecessarily complex tests discount a seminal and underlying principle of property rights—that is, the right to own and control one’s property is a natural, fundamental right that should receive the highest level of legal protection. The burden should not fall to the individual to justify the government intrusion as one that meets a series of complicated and incoherent tests to qualify as a taking. Rather, the burden should be on the government to justify the appropriation as one necessary for the public interest. Then the onus rests with the government to compensate the individual for the negative economic effect the burden places on the owner’s property interest.
As Levin points out repeatedly throughout this book, when government's role and scope increases, our rights, liberties and freedom decrease. As we mathematicians would say, it's axiomatic. While prior Presidents' administrations and Executive Orders tried to rein in takings, those lacked enforcement mechanisms. The structure that constitutional amendments can and do provide can be invoked to permanently protect fundamental property rights and just compensation when taken. That's precisely why Levin proposes an amendment in this chapter to counteract prior SCOTUS cases and the bureaucrats and regulators in DC.
And that is precisely why We the People need you to sign the petition today at conventionofstates.com to call an Article V Convention of States, and to join the growing number of grassroots volunteers advocating for this solution. It is a solution as big as the problem in DC, and we need you to be a part of it.
