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Suppose, that on your month’s vacation, you also leave your car unattended. Upon your return, you note that your automobile is not where you left it. It has been stolen, you surmise. You call the police. They duly trace it down. Unfortunately for you, if we can extrapolate from this home stolen by squatters, the new “owner” has been using your vehicle for 30 days. Bye, bye car for you.

The closest communist country to US is not Cuba.

by Walter E. Block

You go on vacation for a month. You return home, glad to be back, but to your amazement and chagrin, there are strange people living in your house. You have never seen hide nor hair of them before this very moment. They leave the apartment. You pounce. You call a locksmith to change all the locks in your home. You, not these trespassers, are then arrested for unlawfully evicting tenants. According to New York law, if these squatters were occupying your home for 30 days, they are in effect tenants, even though you never signed a lease with them. In this jurisdiction, it takes about 20 months in landlord-tenant court for your case to even be heard and there is far from any guarantee you will prevail before the judge.

This nightmare was actually suffered by Adele Andaloro, owner of a million-dollar home in Flushing, Queens. Well, this might not be accurate. Perhaps I should say, instead, ex-owner of a house she had previously inherited from her parents.

Philosopher Norman Malcolm said of his teacher and mentor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, “On one walk he ‘gave’ to me each tree that we passed, with the reservation that I was not to cut it down or do anything to it, or prevent the previous owners from doing anything to it: with those reservations it was henceforth mine.”[*]

Adele Andaloro is in grave danger of “owning” the house her parents gave her in the same manner as Norman Malcolm “owned” those trees. That is, not at all. Well, at best, partially. She still owns the home, but cannot legally occupy it.

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