It reminds me of the phrase: "Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine".
Maybe it will work out for the state in the long run, but it took the risk to buy land without access, with full knowledge, and cant cry foul later.
Private property rights are only as good as the government that recognizes them. Keep in mind that the government that gives you private property rights (California in this case) also has the right to take as much of your land as they want for 'public use'. If the government wants to play hardball, it is perfectly reasonable for them to build a road across the land and open it to the public. You can't stop them, your only recourse is to argue how much they owe you for doing it.
If you are making a practical force argument, the government is physically capable of illegally exterminating the ranchers, but there would also be consequences.
Building a road or trails across private land is literally a textbook example of eminent domain.
The precedent is that eminent domain is remarkably unrestricted as to what constitutes 'public use' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London). Condemning occupied and habitable homes to build a shopping center is an allowed use per precedent at the federal level (additional restrictions apply in many states). Eminent domain for building a road is basically a given if that is the method that is chosen.
I dont like Kelo at all and doubt the current SCOTUS would rules that same, but understand the ruling. That said, in it's defense, the court was weighing the claimed benefit of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars of tax revenue. They would not have ruled the same if the public benefit were a park bench with no economic value?
I assume you think the forceful taking of native lands by the government was bad, so why do you think it is good to roll back the clock and justify doing it today?
There is an inherent contradiction here. It cant have been bad to do then, but good to do now.
They could justify giving it back?
Or in this particular case, if the landowners are so stubborn that they can not even allow for a road crossing their land, they could at least hint at the idea?
Maybe the government should remind them how they got their land in the first place?
But it is still a sale.
I don't really agree with you, it's not in the public interest that property owners should be able to bogart land merely by encircling it, however the situation should arise, and it invites obvious abuses. Incidentally, the property owners in the article are doing just that, first by selling landlocked property evidently with an agreement among eachother to never sell a public right of way, and then by selling tours that wouldn't be necessary if they had, a form of rent seeking.
The Californian public got by just fine without access for 180 years. There is no urgent need for the public to access the location. Nobody will die or have major hardship without it.
I dont think the government should be engaging in minor utilitarian optimization. That is to say, there should be an very high threshold to use government power even if the the cost to the individual is quite small.
Where the government has trump cards which override individual rights and freedoms, they should be used rarely and out of necessity.
It appears that the land had an easement for access which transfers on sale.
> The land was served by a road easement at the time it was purchased by the state. An underlying landowner sued asserting that the easement was insufficient to permit park visitor travel between Pennington Road and the park, and lost. The court determined that the easement was sufficient to allow visitor use