So it's probably worth mentioning as we launched into the next interview, which I'm looking forward to a great deal that James Madison, generally considered the father of Constitution, said, and this was one of our freedom loving quotes of the day this week, that the government exists to protect our individual rights and property rights. That's the reason the government exists is to protect property rights. Well, this will be a bit of a contrast. Joshua House joins us.
Joshua is an attorney for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian, nonprofit public interest law firm that litigates constitutional cases protecting economic liberty, property rights, school choice, and other civil liberties. Hello Joshua, how are you hey? Doing great? Thanks for having me on. Do I understand that you grew up listening to the Armstrong and Getty Show riding in your mom's car. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Um, you know, commutes
to school, basically starting it around. I want to say the age of thirteen, when my mom started a job out in Livermore. We got we started getting you guys on the on the in the car. Righttastic, So we've actually done some good in the world. Would you be so kind as to call my parents later to so I would be interested if anything our point of view had any uh impact on the direction you went with your schooling and your thoughts. I don't know. I mean, I think it's the area. I feel like there's a
strong libertarian streak in northern California. So I think that was kind of a product of the entire environment. And and I'm not sure I'm digging you know. This is a different topic, but how regularly we run into people. I've been listening to you since as a tiny kid with five kids. The hell so listen. Uh, you guys have had a couple of great victories lately. But let's talk about something I believe you're in the middle of, and that's fighting on behalf of a Norco homeowner who
allegedly had violated some of the city's housing code. Tell us about that case. Yeah, sure, So Norco is about ten minutes south of Riverside. Um. It is not, you know, the typical suburban neighborhood. It is the kind of ranch homes they call themselves Horsetown, USA. In fact, everybody's got of a horse trail running through their backyard. This is in south central California. For folks listening around the globe,
go on, Josh, that's right, the Great Inland Empire. So uh so you know, Ron, it was a hobby machinist, fixes up some things. He's got a lot of machinery in his yard. I remember being taken aback by the fact that he's got a giant kind of trailer thing in the back. But then I went around and everyone has some sort of horse trailer or something in his backyard. Well, he was cited for violating the city's code for all
that kind of things. But instead of just sighting him and asking for a fine asking him to clean it up, they actually freatened to take his house because of the mess in the backyard. And that's that's when Ron started fighting back. He actually got an attorney, he got the case thrown out. They were trying to take it and put it into a receivership, which is where they give a government appointed official your property to fix it up for you. Uh, they were going to do that. He
fought it. No receiver ever got the property. But then after he thought he had won, the attorneys for the city sent him a bill for over sixty dollars and that was supposedly because well, they had to pay that the costs of the whole receivership, but they didn't win the receivership. The court ruled in Ron's favor. Correct. Yeah, the court actually vacated kind of got rid of the original receivership ruling it had originally awarded the receivership when
he was in the hospital. He couldn't show up the court. He had a heart surgery. Um. And this is what's crazy is that, you know, a normal government official going going into court when the court looks at you and says, are you sure you want to proceed because the defendant is in the hospital. A normal official who has you know, he's susceptible to the public will, is probably going to
think twice, that's right. This. This is not a normal government official that's asking for the sixty dollars that brought this case against him. This is a private law firm. And the law firm actually makes its money by going after these people. It offers what's called cost recovery services to these tiny cities, and it basically says, hey, why pay your own attorneys when we'll get our fees back
from the people we prosecute. And that goes for both criminal violations as well as civil enforcement cases like nuisance abatements or these receivership proceedings. So it's a prosecutor essentially asking you to pay for the privilege of having been prosecuted unsuccessfully in this case. And as you pointed out in some of the written material that we read before he came on, this was not like the first time they made this maneuver. These companies do this over and
over again. Somebody's got backyard chickens they're not supposed to have. All of a sudden they say, all right, I'll get rid of the chickens, and they get hit with a giant legal bill for the right of being prosecuted. That's right. And actually this is kind of a follow up, so you're referring to another case. We had an India, which is also in the same same area of California, and you know, in that case, it was it was you know, it caused such a stir that the California legislature nearly
unanimously passed a bill to stop this practice. The problem is they added, during the whole legislative rigmarole, a tiny exception that basically said, for civil cases. Well, the problem is a lot of enforcement cases in California don't go to criminal court. They go to a civil essentially a civil court, but it's still an enforcement proceeding, and the
California has Supreme Court has still that look. A prosecutor, whether in a civil enforcement or criminal enforcement, cannot have a conflict of interest, cannot make money from prosecuting people. Joshua House is an attorney for the Institute for Justice. They try to protect your rights. So, josh just in general, before we let you go, I'm sorry, may we call you Joshua? Do you really prefer Joshua? Josh a shorter
Why don't you go with that? Alright? Um, is even shorter than so, josh What is do you think the most common, the most egregious, the most annoying infringement on property rights going on in the US today? Well, I'd say I'm biased because kind of my niche here at the Institute for Justice is these code enforcement sorts of cases.
And I think people don't realize, you know, we get all upset about the federal government and it's it seems so large and kind of Leviathan like, but really some of the gravest abuses of liberty can happen at these tiny municipal levels where there's a lot of kind of personal influence over the government, where you know, someone a city council decides they don't like the one guy in town who's kind of this, you know, maybe a bit
of a character, and they can go after him. And there are very few do process protections for what goes on at kind of the local level. We haven't. We had another case actually in um in Pagdale, Missouri. It's right outside St. Louis, where one of our clients had been ticketed for having mismatched drapes. In other words, the drapes on some windows didn't match the drapes on other Windows's somewhere that was a thing. But really the point
of that wasn't her color of her drapes. It was that the city made sometimes over its income from ticketing people this way. Well, right, you know, it's funny. I was just going to bring up the case of points just flitted out of my head. Um uh, where they
had all the riots and everything um Ferguson, Missouri. That was the media was so obsessed with the race baiting aspects of the case that they barely reported on the fact that the people of Ferguson were thoroughly piste off, that they were constantly being targeted with tiki tak offenses and fine didn't stopped for rolling stop signs all the time, and that was a major part of the local budget. And they realized that they were being exploited because they
couldn't afford to hire lawyers and stuff like that. And there was a generalized resentment against the government. So I love that you guys are targeting this sort of thing. H Joshua House is an attorney for the Institute for Justice. Hey, Joshua, thanks a bunch. Let's stay in touch. Love the work you guys are doing great. Yeah, thanks for having me on. All right, keep it up. That is so true. My the town I live in, it turns out, has been
completely corrupt. There was just a big audit of it, and and they were playing fast and loose with so many different things and so many backscratching deals in illegal use of funds and funky accounting and the rest of it. They got caught as a small town. Newspapers go away and all our focuses on national media and the president, the president of the president, and we didn't. We don't even have the patience to talk about Congress anymore. It's the president, always the president.