What's Yours is Mine
Julian Sanchez | June 23, 2005, 10:56am
The Supreme Court has rendered its verdict in Kelo v. New London, and the widely-expected result has come to pass: a 5-4 loss for property rights. As Raich taught us that growing pot in your backyard for personal consumption is "interstate commerce," Kelo informs us that taking people's homes to hand over to private developers building an office complex is a "public use."
You do wonder: Now that the "liberal" justices on the court have sided with the drug warriors against cancer patients, and with a plan to rob people of their homes for the benefit of wealthy developers, will some court-watchers on the left begin to question the wisdom of having let economic freedom become the red-headed stepchild of modern jurisprudence?
UPDATE: The opinions are here. As with Raich (in a sense just a reaffirmation of Wickard), we're just seeing a particularly outrageous confirmation of what was already, in effect, the law. As the majority opinion says, quoting an earlier decision, the "Court long ago rejected any literal requirement that condemned property be put into use for the ... public." Which is to say, they've rejected the notion that "public use" means anything more stringent than: "legislators want to do this." The Court's view is that any "public purpose" will do, and such purposes apparently include increased tax revenue. The straightforward implication is that any taking of a private residence to hand it over to a business, or just from a poor person to a wealthy person, will be a taking in service of a public purpose: As a general rule, the rich pay more taxes than the poor, and businesses pay more taxes than households.
UPDATE 2:The Institute for Justice's press release on the verdict is here.
R C Dean | June 23, 2005, 2:10pm | #
"In addition to creating jobs, generating tax revenue, and helping to “build momentum for the revitalization of downtown New London,” id., at 92, the plan was also designed to make the City more attractive and to create leisure and recreational opportunities on the waterfront and in the park."
So all you have to do is cobble together a "plan" that is supposed to achieve a variety of nebulous, speculative, and/or subjective outcomes.
C'mon. I know a number of venture capitalists who would wet themselves laughing at a business plan that was as weak as what is described above. Its pretense, a sham, plain and simple. Sure, you can choose to fall for it (yeah, joe, I'm looking at you), but that doesn't make it legitimate or real.
This would justify just about any "taking" to create a Walmart, for example. How would that go down, joe? Well, it'll creat jobs and raise tax revenue, so who cares how much seizing the family farm puts in Sam Walton's pocket, eh?
I can't decide which has been a blacker day - today, the day the Court upheld McCain-Feingold, or the day the upheld federal jurisdiction over medical marijuana. Truly, the American experiment in government via a Constitutional republic is dead.
RandyAyn | June 23, 2005, 2:18pm | #
For some reason I just started thinking about the cover of the album "The Royal Scam" by Steely Dan. A tramp flops on a park bench underneath enormous buildings which have become raging animals at war with one another.
We are that tramp. Those buildings are the powers which control our lives, over which we ourselves have no control. We close our eyes and sleep, fearful of what we might encounter should we awaken.
Let us read from the Book of Steely Dan:
And they wandered in
From the city of St. John
Without a dime
Wearing coats that shined
Both red and green
Colors from their sunny island
From their boats of iron
They looked upon the promised land
Where surely life was sweet
On the rising tide
To New York City
Did they ride into the street
See the glory
Of the royal scam
They are hounded down
To the bottom of a bad town
Amid the ruins
Where they learn to fear
An angry race of fallen kings
Their dark companions
While the memory of
Their southern sky was clouded by
A savage winter
Every patron saint
Hung on the wall, shared the room
With twenty sinners
See the glory
Of the royal scam
By the blackened wall
He does it all
He thinks he's died and gone to heaven
Now the tale is told
By the old man back home
He reads the letter
How they are paid in gold
Just to babble in the back room
All night and waste their time
And they wandered in
From the city of St. John without a dime
See the glory
Of the royal scam
joe | June 23, 2005, 9:02pm | #
RC, the "use" in question, by the government, isn't the ultimate land use that gets constructed and operated on the taken land.
The use, the public use, to which the land is put, is the redevelopment itself. The assemblange of land, the demolition, the re-parcelization, whatever cleanup and site prep goes on, the sale of the land to the developer, with whatever conditions are placed on it.
THAT process, not the construction and operation of the Gap that gets built there, is the public use. What makes this a public use is not that there are government employees or infrastructure on it, but that the government is using this land in this way not to provide a public drinking supply, or for the conveyance of automobiles, but for a different public purpose - the elimination of blighted conditions, the provision of adequate public space and roadways in an area, or (in this case) the economic benefits.
Now it's in that last area, how to define what is a public purpose, that the real conversation is happening. And that's an incredibly important, difficult nut to crack. We need all the smart people, from all the differen perspectives, to help out with it. Meanwhile, you libertoids, and Thomas, are just out in Never Neverland, wanking away about entire texbooks full of sound legal decisions that led in an inevitable direction being thrown out the window.
metalgrid | June 24, 2005, 10:44am | #
It's nice to see the long term consequences of this horrible decision so quickly brought to light. It disgusts me that people can support this decision on the basis of "well, some bad stuff might happen, but it will at least allow me to do what I want." I cannot f*cking believe that people support these "liberal" judges to protect Roe v. Wade, while having all of the rest of their civil liberties (the ones that are actually enshrined IN THE CLEAR F*CKING TEXT of the Constitution) get gutted.
There is an essential difference between the two:
In RvW, it was a positive decision by the courts basically tying the hands of legislatures across the nation who would seek to interfere with a person's ownership of their body.
In KvNL, it was a negative decision by the courts - which still allows legislatures to strengthen individual property rights, or weaken them even further. In other words, it's an open ended decision that doesn't create any new rules.
Now, you can rant and rave all you want, but it is a very important difference between the two. RvW cann't be undone without changes in the court itself. KvNL can be undone by affecting change in legislatures, moving to different areas where legislatures protect property better, etc.
As a result, as dissappointed as I am with this decision, it is still better than having social conservatives in the courts limiting individual rights instead of throwing them back to the states. Now this might have something to do with my view of property stemming from ownership of one's self, and then ones surroundings, and thus placing a higher value on freedom of self-ownership and individual action as opposed to placing a higher value on ownership of extraneous entities. Then again, as I've mentioned earlier, self-ownership is dead as well, when you consider that income tax is your 'rent' to the state to allow you to use your skills and sales tax is your 'rent' to the state to allow you to sell the product of your labor.
Mao was correct - power does grow out of the barrel of a gun, all we really own is our lives, everything else, including our bodies and its skills are property of the state.
smacky | June 24, 2005, 2:58pm | #
So I guess from now on nothing I own is really mine.
I was going to make some sort of general quiz to determine whether property you possess is actually "yours", but, eh, it's Friday and this thread is waaaaay too long for me to get through, much less thoroughly respond to. And I'm arriving much too late to the conversation. *sigh*
anyone want to organize a mass vomiting on the stoop of the SC?
No, I don't vomit on command; but I am up for leaving a bunch of flaming bags of poop.
Since this office complex is now officially a public use, maybe once it is constructed we, as members of the public, should go there and, uh, use it.
By "use", do you mean: drag our bare asses until they are clean on the new carpeting, after we fill up the brown paper bags?
These poor folks should all paint the american flag across the outside of their houses, it'll make a great photo when the bulldozers come rolling in.
If they really do raze the houses, somebody should really take the time to email these people and tell them about this idea. It would be brilliant to see, if indeed the show must go on.
Rational people need to fight this slide into hell with every weapon available. We cannot continue to stand on the sidelines flapping our gums and writing comments to this blog. We have to take back our country from these assholes who find new ways to shit in our sandbox every day.
I wholeheartedly agree with Crushinator. This is the biggest reason I have trouble taking this blog seriously half the time. Sure, it's a great news source. Is that it, though? I mean, for all the jabbering we do on here daily, what does it accomplish in the end? Elucidating our ideas is important, but I swear, sometimes this place is just treading water. Why bother restating what we obviously agree on most of the time? Sorry to be so nihilistic, but I feel so helpless.
Someone mentioned that they'd like to see video of those people being thrown off of their property by the government. Now THAT is a summer roadtrip I would love to take part in. I would love to actually videotape it, and disseminate the video all across America to show it as the travesty of basic human rights that it is. People need to see this kind of thing to believe what is happening.
Egh, I've only read about half the commments and I'm completely worn out. I hate it when I miss a really good thread and it gets so ridiculously long that it's impossible to catch up.
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