Make government pay if it restricts the use of your property. What could be fairer than that?

Such is the surface appeal of Initiative 933, which would force public agencies to either compensate owners or drop regulations if those rules kept people from turning the maximum possible profit on their lands and other property.

In fact, I-933 is a perfect example of H.L. Mencken’s reputed crack: “There is an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible and wrong.” The problem, in this case, is unreasonable restrictions on property, such as forbidding farmers to open roadside produce shops on their farms.

The real solution to this problem is to repeal or relax such restrictions on a case-by-case basis. That requires common sense and a rifleshot approach.

I-933’s “easy solution” instead amounts to a nuclear strike on the power of state and local government to regulate, period, retroactive to Jan. 1, 1996. All potentially profit-limiting restrictions on property – any property, not just land – enacted since that date would trigger the requirement that the owners be paid or the restriction waived on demand.

Compensation would require billions of dollars cities, counties and state agencies don’t have, so either existing services would have to be cut to make the payments or the rules dropped.

Government regulations are easy to rail against in the abstract, but most are there for good reason.

Zoning regulations stop the guy next door from throwing up a service station – or a junkyard – on his lot. They protect residential neighborhoods from strip malls and industrial plants that may ruin property values. Growth management policies prevent developers from dropping subdivisions amid farms and forests.

Wetland protections help prevent devastating floods. Rules that keep large trucks off busy highways during rush hour reduce congestion. (Yes, truck owners could claim compensation under I-933.)

Any such property regulation adopted after Jan. 1, 1996 could be subject to attack under I-933. Lakewood did not incorporate until after that magic date, so every new zoning and property restriction enacted by its elected city council would be fair game if the initiative passes.

The measure’s sponsors want voters to focus on the profits denied to property owners when they can’t do whatever they want with their assets. Better to focus on the enormous costs I-933 would impose on taxpayers in general. The measure would force public agencies to incur huge administrative expenses; it would require taxpayers to pay the lawyers of property owners even if their claims prove baseless; it would authorize private raids on the public treasury when regulations cannot be waived.

This initiative may look “fair” to the select property owners it would enrich, but its unprecedented, radical, extra-constitutional notion of property rights would be catastrophic for the state as a whole.

I-933 must be rejected.