Something I’ve been saying for many years, has been that governments may not make short term rental regulations or restrictions. I’m sure some people have thought I was silly to be saying this, since in the last 15 years since Airbnb arose, we’ve seen short term rental regulations multiplying in every city, state, and nation around the world. It’s become almost de rigeur for every jurisdiction to have short term rental regulations.
But as I’ve repeated in several articles, the mere fact that a government is doing something, doesn’t make that action lawful. This is something that the “rule followers” among us have a very hard time understanding. However, this is a VERY important point for people to understand, and not enough people are able to see this.
Any number of very simple thought experiments can demonstrate this point. Think to yourself: would you be fine with a government that, for instance, passed a law stating that no one can use their own car to leave their city without getting a “permit” from the local government, perhaps justifying this on the basis of “climate change” threats caused by people driving cars? How about a law stating that no one can buy more than a certain amount of meat at the grocery store each month, or maybe even, no one can buy ANY meat, because the government now stands for ethical treatment of animals and determines that slaughter of animals for food is no longer permissible? A law mandating everyone go on a vegetarian diet?
You may think these kinds of things are ridiculous, that governments would never do such things. However, consider that 100 years ago, people would have likewise considered it ridiculous that a government would pass “rent control” laws and begun to prohibit property owners from raising the rent more than an allowed amount, or terminating a rental contract, if they did not have a specific permitted reason to do so. Yet here we are, existing under such obscenely unlawful “laws”, and people have just accepted this, because, “well the government did it, so it must be legal.” No. Just no. What has essentially happened over the last many decades, even a couple centuries, is that people have gradually been made into “prisoners” of a corrupt, criminal government, without even realizing it. They have been fed propaganda and lies by this corrupt government, propaganda intended to cause them to adapt to an increasing encroachment upon their God given rights, and a great many have indeed accommodated themselves to what amounts to a state of imprisonment by their government.
Simply put, in order to be able to have any perspective on whether a government actions are lawful and just, one has to have a well-founded understanding of the limitations of government, which issues out of an understanding of the natural law and common law origins of all governments, as well as the US Consitution. This understanding is needed in order to have some type of “measuring stick” to be able to assess whether any given government action is lawful or not.
So in this article, I want to explain both why short term rental (STR for short) regulations and restrictions are unlawful, and also why, in spite of that, we’ve seen them enormously proliferating.
Natural Law: What It Is and Why It’s Important
The first step in this explanation, is to bring up the topic of natural law, and explain why it’s so very important to our discussion.
Let’s consider the question of where law comes from and where do our rights come from. A great many people in the United States, believe that our rights come from the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. They would be completely wrong.
We see that in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, it is stated clearly that our rights come from “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” This is a very clear reference to natural law. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-tradition-of-rights
This is the preamble of the Declaration of Independence: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
In Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
It is clearly known by our Founders, in other words, that our rights come from God, and natural law, and not from government. Government exists, actually, only to secure these natural rights that we already have.
As also explained in this video by KrisAnne Hall, Constitutional Attorney, our rights are NOT given to us by our governments.
Another way in which we can intuitively understand that our rights are not simply granted to us by our government, when we realize that communities of people existed long before there were “governments”. So, if rights come from governments, does that mean that before there were governments, people had no rights? Of course not. We can also intuitively understand, that people did not come together to create governments, in order that they would have fewer rights.
But perhaps more important to our thinking process about this, is to understand where law comes from in the first place. What many do not realize, is that our foundation of law in the United States, comes from the English common law tradition, which in turn is based on the wider European tradition of common law, which in turn is based on the ancient system of natural law. See these articles which help explain in depth, what natural law and common law are about.
Natural law: https://commonlawamerica.wordpress.com/2023/07/24/the-constitution-is-not-enough-our-foundation-in-natural-law/
Common law:
https://commonlawamerica.wordpress.com/2023/07/25/what-is-common-law-and-where-does-it-come-from/
In essence, natural law, as described in this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
This summarizes natural law from the Wiki article:
Natural law[1] (Latin: ius naturale, lex naturalis) is a philosophical and legal theory that posits the existence of a set of inherent laws derived from nature and universal moral principles, which are discoverable through reason. In ethics, natural law theory[2] asserts that certain rights and moral values are inherent in human nature and can be understood universally, independent of enacted laws or societal norms. In jurisprudence, natural law—sometimes referred to as iusnaturalism[3] or jusnaturalism,[4] but not to be confused with what is called simply naturalism in legal philosophy[5][6]—holds that there are objective legal standards based on morality that underlie and inform the creation, interpretation, and application of human-made laws. This contrasts with positive law (as in legal positivism),[7] which emphasizes that laws are rules created by human authorities and are not necessarily connected to moral principles. Natural law can refer to “theories of ethics, theories of politics, theories of civil law, and theories of religious morality“,[8] depending on the context in which naturally-grounded practical principles are claimed to exist.
In Western tradition, natural law was anticipated by the pre-Socratics, for example, in their search for principles that governed the cosmos and human beings. The concept of natural law was documented in ancient Greek philosophy, including Aristotle,[9] and was mentioned in ancient Roman philosophy by Cicero. References to it are also found in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and were later expounded upon in the Middle Ages by Christian philosophers such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. The School of Salamanca made notable contributions during the Renaissance.
Although the central ideas of natural law had been part of Christian thought since the Roman Empire, its foundation as a consistent system was laid by Aquinas, who synthesized and condensed his predecessors’ ideas into his Lex Naturalis (lit. ’natural law’).[10] Aquinas argues that because human beings have reason, and because reason is a spark of the divine, all human lives are sacred and of infinite value compared to any other created object, meaning everyone is fundamentally equal and bestowed with an intrinsic basic set of rights that no one can remove.
So in essence, what I am saying about our system of law here, is that it is entirely based upon common law, which in turn is based upon natural law, which is essentially a system of reasonable moral principles. This means that in order to have any validity, all law must be in harmony with natural law. This is stated in this document https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/148692719.pdf on page 13 of the document (shown as pg 22) where it is said, “all power to frame human law must be derived from natural law. A law which is not in conformity with the natural law, is no law at all. “The first rule of reason is the law of nature, . . . consequently every human law has just as much of the nature of law, as it is derived from the law of nature.”
The Wiki article also quotes of Sir Matthew Hale as saying that “he viewed natural law as antecedent, preparatory, and subsequent to civil government,[111] and stated that human law “cannot forbid what the Law of Nature injoins, nor Command what the Law of Nature prohibits.”
Natural law is not merely based on morality, but also, even more so, upon reason and “natural principles” which can be understood by human reason. So this means that simply by reflecting upon our human situation, we can make certain reasonable deductions. For our purposes in this article, one of those deductions is that human beings have a need for self-preservation, and for sustaining themselves and providing for themselves. The way that people have done this since time beyond memory, moved from the hunting and gathering cultures of early humanity, gradually over time to the modern arrangements of engaging themselves in different types of work or business, which enabled them to obtain resources to then purchase what they needed to sustain themselves.
Because providing for oneself is necessary for one’s survival, we can readily see that doing so must be viewed as a natural right under natural law, which means, a right that we have from God, not something that any government can take away.
Moving on from having established that, we move to the question of whether government can legitimately regulate any business. We can also use reason to realize that yes, since natural law is not only about individual’s own interests, but is also oriented to the common good, governments would have to be able to regulate business to some extent, because we can readily understand that some types of business would negatively impact the common good, whether by way of hoarding resources, negatively affecting a community through noise, or pollution, or other dangers to community, or by creating a monopoly that could put many others out of business. So we can appreciate that individual rights are not unlimited, but have to be balanced with the common good, when individuals are doing things that can have a potentially negative effect upon others. In his writings on natural law, St Thomas Aquinas wrote at length about natural law and the common good.
Yet we can also understand, that in the absence of any negative impact upon the common good, governments would be forbidden from intruding upon our natural rights, such as our right to do business.
First Deduction: If Self-Preservation and Sustaining Oneself is a God-Given Natural Right Issuing out of Need, Governments are Forbidden from Requiring “Permits” to Do Business
It’s ubiquitous these days, in every municipality, that governments require everyone to get a permit or license to do any type of business, and pay business taxes on one’s business income. However, this blanket licensure requirement, everywhere that it occurs, is a significant violation of natural law. Because it implies that we have no natural right to do business and freely contract with others, but have to obtain that right from our government by way of a “license” that it issues to us.
The freedom to do business, is essentially the freedom of two people to contract with one another. One offers a product or service, and the other offers some compensation for that product or service. See freedom to contract under Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_contract
This subject also ties in with the natural right to do business, something discussed by many writers on natural law, as summed up in this AI overview:
So the first deduction we can make, is that governments absolutely MAY NOT require every person operating any type of business, or engaging in contracts with others, to obtain its permission by way of licenses or permits. Doing business and freely contracting with others are natural rights we have, not rights we derive from government. Thus, the only case in which governments may regulate business, would be in cases where a business significantly impacts a community, or has potential detrimental effects upon a community, such as because the business is quite large and could have certain impacts, could involve hoarding of resources, creating a monopoly, or pollution or noise, or some other such undesirable impact.
So this allows us to determine that when governments impose requirements for business licenses, and punish people with fines for “operating a business without a license”, such governments are in violation of natural law, are enforcing laws that are on their face unlawful, and such governments could even be viewed as engaging in criminal acts.
Since every single type of “short term rental regulation” at the very least requires people “register” with the local government, often requires obtaining a “permit”, and usually requires payment of a fee to operate, those regulations are all entirely unlawful. No one has to obtain government permission or pay the government in order to engage in something that they have a God given right to do, which is theirs to do by virtue of natural law.
Arguments Given by Governments Justifying Short Term Rental Regulations Are Not Reasonable
The next topic to discuss, is that apart from their unlawful requirements that individuals obtain government permission to engage in their God-given rights to do business, is to look at what justifications governments are giving for their STR regulations. Across states, and nations, the arguments made by governments are very similar: they revolve around two ideas primarily. The first is the notion that short term rentals pose some unique type of nuisance to the community, which the government acting on behalf of the common good, is required to act to protect. The second is the argument that short term rentals deplete the housing supply, or harm the “traditional character” of a given community.
These are both specious and disingenous arguments, which in most cases I believe are made by people who understand quite clearly that they are telling lies.
In the first instance, it is true that there have been a number of disruptive parties associated with short term rentals, but as those are noise disruptions, the appropriate approach by governments would be to address noise disruptions as noise disruptions, with ordinances about noise and public disturbances. This is just so obvious, that it leads one to suspect that governments are engaged in a covert agenda to undermine people’s ability to do short term rentals, by claiming not only that they uniquely are associated with excessive noise, but also that somehow governments cannot address noise concerns with ordinances about noise, but instead have to ban or restrict STR operators. This line of argument strains credulity and its stupidity exposes a covert agenda.
For we all know that there are noise issues and public disturbances associated with all types of residences, both long term rentals, as well as owner occupied properties.
Ditto with concerns about trash or parking. If the concern is about trash, deal with it with garbage ordinances. If about parking, use parking ordinances. Again, the fact that governments can’t figure this out, is very suspicious and to me it exposes their hidden anti-STR agenda.
As regards the government’s arguments that “we have to protect the traditional character of this community”, or, “we have to protect the housing supply”, again these are non-arguments, which issue out of what I call “concept creep” as regards the government’s duty to protect the common good. Yes, governments do have an obligation to protect the common good, but over the last many decades, they have continued to unlawfully expand their powers and authority, by claiming that an ever increasing number of areas of society, must be regulated for the common good. This ever-greater expansion of ideas of the “common good” are not legitimate. In particular, this expansion of regulations ostensibly for “the common good” has been accompanied by a proliferation of regulation that restricts or even eliminates certain property rights.
And we can readily see, for instance, that although many governments side with renters and claim they are acting to restrict the rights of property owners, in order to protect “the housing supply”, they have profoundly misrepresented the situation by claiming that the only or primary “common good” involved is the situation of renters, and not that of property owners. They have (in my opinion intentionally) engaged in a kind of propaganda effort, where in a situation of two social concerns — that of renters’ ability to find affordable housing, and property owner’s rights to do with their property as they please — they seem to invariably view one of these as the only, or certainly the greater, “common good”. They have also misrepresented the situation in presenting it as a false dichotomy, as if it’s only a choice between supply of housing for renters, and rights of property owners. But once we realize that the supply of housing is not at all meaningfully impacted by what property owners do with their properties, but instead is a result of government regulations, we begin to see the lies that governments are ubiquitously involved in.
In fact, as natural law, common law and Constitutional law all emphasize, property rights are very foundational rights — perhaps the foundation of all other rights. And so in any circumstance where we are trying to balance something like availability of housing for renters versus property rights, property rights must always be preferred. Because property rights are a natural right everyone has under natural law, whereas the ability of a renter to find housing in any given area, in one’s price range, is not a natural right that anyone has. It’s in essence a “fake” right, created by a government intend on leveraging this fake right in order to decimate the rights of property owners.
Certainly governments can work with communities to help create sufficient housing, but this is never legitimately done by destroying other’s property rights. Renter’s “rights” to housing where they want it and in the price range they want it, is a fake “right” that emerges from a government that first of all, has itself worked hard in so many ways (from the foundation of the Federal Reserve system and all the consequences of this, as well as the imposition of totally unlawful taxes like income tax, property tax) to create the very housing problems it aims to solve. It has worked to make housing less available and more expensive, and secondly, has set itself up to offer the “solution” for the problem that it itself has created. It has fraudulently and criminally revisioned itself as founded with a basically “DEI” social engineering mission, a mission consisting of socialist (and likely eventually communist) destruction of rights in order to allow government seizure of property and then a claim of authority to equitable redistribution of goods. That kind of communist vision of government has nothing to do with what our Founders intended, nor is it anywhere reflected in the centuries of development of our system of law, and the development of all systems of law in the world.
In no area has this dynamic of (criminal) expansionist government been combined with restriction of private property rights, as clearly as with the topic of housing supply. In this article I wrote several years ago https://globalhostingblogs.com/2015/12/18/airbnb-and-the-housing-crisis/ I examine this issue in depth, and demonstrate why “the housing crisis” and any issues related to inadequate housing supply, have little to nothing to do with short term rentals, and instead have to do with government actions and government regulations.
So in essence, governments themselves have created a shortage of housing in some areas (or, shortage of affordable housing) but they are, in my opinion, intentionally scapegoating short term rental operators for this problem, in order to justify unlawful regulations and restrictions on short term rental operators.
Property Rights are Connected to Natural Rights to do Business with One’s Property
This article is a very good one, which explores the topic of property rights.
https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-handbook-policy-makers-8th-edition-2017/property-rights-constitution
It’s stated in the article that “America’s Founders understood clearly that private property is the foundation not only of prosperity but of freedom itself. Thus, through the common law, state law, and the Constitution, they protected property rights — the rights of people to acquire, use, and dispose of property freely.”
As well, the article points out that the common law upon which our system of law was founded, emphasized free use. “Given our modern permitting regime, however, the point to be noticed here is that the presumption of the common law was ordinarily on the side of free use. People were not required to obtain a permit before using their property, that is, just as people today are not required to obtain a permit before speaking. Rather, the burden was on those who objected to a given use to show how it violated a right of theirs. That amounts to having to show that their neighbor’s use takes something they own free and clear. If they failed in that, the use could continue.“
This demonstrates how the status quo that we all experience in our bloated and overreaching, unlawful, in fact criminal government system, is precisely backwards. Governments everywhere are acting against people’s natural and common law rights to free use of their residential property — which means renting as a residential rental it in any way that they please, whether as a long term or short term rental — without requiring those objecting to such use, to make an adequate showing of how a neighbor’s STR use would “take something that they own free and clear.” And if you think about it, there really is virtually no possible way that one person renting out their property as a short term rental, could “take away” something owned by another person. This is just an elaborate fiction created by a government system intent on depriving us of our rights.
One way that these local governments deceitfully and dishonestly make their case, is by claiming that a property owner engaged in short term rentals is engaged in a “commerical use” of residential property, which is prohibited if a property is not located in a “commercial zone.” However, renting a property as a short term rental is NOT a commerical use of it. It’s a residential use. Some courts have clarified that. People are renting it to reside there, not to run a storefront retail business from the home.
Our Constitution was designed to help protect our God-given natural rights, and we see property rights protected in part under the 5th and 14th Amendments. As stated in the Cato Institute article:
The Constitution protects property rights through the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ Due Process Clauses and, more directly, through the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause: “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” There are two basic ways government can take property: (1) outright, by condemning the property and taking title; and (2) through regulations that take uses, leaving the title with the owner — so-called regulatory takings. In the first case, the title is all too often taken not for a public but for a private use; and rarely is the compensation received by the owner just. In the second case, the owner is often not compensated at all for his losses; and when he is, the compensation is again inadequate.
All short term rental regulations and restrictions, amount to “regulatory takings” of private property, and are thus unlawful as viewed by the Constitution, in addition to simply being clear violations of natural law.
Why Has the Government So Clearly Violated Our God Given Rights in This Regard?
The obvious question resulting from the discussion thus far, would be, if it’s so patently clear as I am presenting the case, that the government has been acting unlawfully in trying to regulate or restrict short term rental businesses, why would governments absolutely everywhere be doing this? Wouldn’t it be obvious to many that these kinds of measures are unlawful?
This article well explains why governments everywhere are doing this: https://commonlawamerica.wordpress.com/2023/10/05/the-cabal-wants-to-steal-your-real-property-case-example-of-the-criminal-system/
In essence, we live under a criminal government system. This is not happening in just a handful of areas, it is happening nationwide. And it is not just happening nationwide, it is happening worldwide. In essence, as is described in the linked article, there has been a coordinated effort, among governments around the world, to deprive us of our God-given rights, as well as to gradually condition us to accept more and more government overreach. This has all been coordinated by a Deep State, eg a global crime syndicate, towards the ultimate goal of establishing a One World totalitarian government.
In the big picture, short term rental regulations and restrictions, are one of the smaller crimes perpetrated by this Deep State. There are much more serious crimes that it has perpetrated through legislative acts. Such as the proliferation of “rent control” laws and ordinances in countless cities. Such as the creation of the Federal Reserve, a wholly unlawful and criminal action. Such as the creation of a vast, wholly unlawful fourth branch of government which we call the administrative state.
On the surface of it, this may sound absurd and ridiculous to many, who would view this more as a theme from a Hollywood movie, and not something that would ever happen in reality. However, all of us have seen that when Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, he ran on the promise that the government that had been taken away from them by Washington bureaucrats, would be returned to the people. And since 2016, he has spoken more and more overtly and directly about how he is out to dismantle the Deep State. And the Deep State is just another term for the global crime syndicate. Listen to what he says here:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o7vViJ1c7xs
He also speaks to that same topic here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5qxdGZf4Fw
In fact, President Trump is the public face of the operation to dismantle the global crime syndicate, aka the Deep State, aka the Cabal.
Over the last 4 months in particular, we’ve seen an increasing amount of exposure of evidence that clearly reveals some elements in government conspiring in crimes against the American people. This week, we also saw the start of more public revelations of a massive crime that many of us knew about over 4 years ago: how the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. A crime of this magnitude cannot occur without significant and widespread criminal infiltration into our government. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alleged-chinese-scheme-influence-2020-election-biden-being-probed-fbi-senate-judiciary-committee
So, because there has been a long-standing plan to dismantle the Cabal, and because this is now occurring, one deduction we can draw from this, is that there is no area in the process of restoration of our Republic which the Deep State will win, and the good guys lose. This is why we have seen and can continue to expect to see, President Trump and the Trump Administration win in all of their efforts to remove criminality and restore constitutional law to our nation. It will be unmitigated winning for the rule of law that we see henceforth.
With the Dismantling of the Deep State, Constitutional Law Will Return to Our Nation
So this brings us to the conclusion of this article, and the question many doubtless will have, about what the heck can we do, if government everywhere is developing short term rental regulations that are not lawful.
Consider that this particular area, is but one of countless examples of government that has unlawfully overreached and deprived us of the very God-given rights, that government was instituted among men, in order to protect. With so much having been unlawfully taken from us, if we had to undo all of this bit by bit, law by law, at every level of government, this process would take many decades. The volume of unconstitutional laws, regulations, ordinances and other rules and policies, is just too vast, to be undone quickly in the same manner it was put in place.
This is why I believe that it is unlikely that all of this government criminality is going to be undone bit by bit, law by law, for decades to come. To some extent we will see a process of moving some key items through courts, but in general, I believe that there will be a process undertaken, which disposes of rather large volumes of unconstitutional legislation, comparatively quickly. I do not know just how this will occur, but common sense dictates that Trump’s promises of a Golden Age, great prosperity for all, a government returned to the people, were not made in order to point to things that may only materialize, 20 or 30 years from now. As well, President Trump and his team have set up a year-long 250th annniversary celebration for our nation, which began May 25 2025. I submit that few of us are in any mood to celebrate, as long as our criminal and out of control government is still everywhere unlawfully regulating and restricting our businesses, and stealing from us 6 ways from Sunday. Thus, it stands to reason, that our liberation from all this government criminality, is rather immanent, and shall not be long delayed.
globalhostingblogs 
You must be logged in to post a comment.