Kelo v. Complexity
Charles Paul Freund | June 27, 2005, 3:16pm
John Norquist, a former mayor of Milwaukee and president of the Congress for New Urbanism, offers PBS a liberal case against Kelo.
Norquist found the Court's decision "shocking, really. The founders of the country put the word 'public use' in the 5th Amendment for a reason, because they wanted property rights to be part of our democracy. And there are really legitimate reasons for condemnation . . . But [Kelo] opens it up to virtually anything; any municipality could say 'Well, the land will be more valuable.'"
The "real problem," thinks Norquist, "is that municipalities haven't been that good at predicting what actions will increase the value of property. I mean, there's empty lots all over urban sites in America where cities have condemned land and then it just sits there idle."
That's Norquist the ex-mayor, of course. For Norquist the New Urbanist, Kelo is a threat to the "complexity of cities" championed by preservationist, pro-pedestrian planners. "The key to revitalization of American cities," he said, "is the complexity of cities, the form of cities, the streets and blocks that were being ripped apart [by urban renewal projects] in the '60s and '70s and '80s. Cities have finally started to figure out that the urban form is actually valuable and they don't need to tear cities down and try to turn them into the suburbs. And that's really what this decision -- the majority opinion sort of implies, that somehow cities automatically know what adds value."
Back in 1999, Randall O'Toole wrote about New Urbanism for reason here. [Note: I've shortened and simplified this last reference since putting up the post.]
Eric the .5b | June 27, 2005, 7:26pm | #
What's the justification for giving Farmer Bob title to his ground, defending his created right to quiet enjoyment, and whatever other public services he votes for, without charging him?
None (aside from the natural question "where do you live where you only pay taxes on things you actually voted for?"). Two problems, though.
The first problem is that you're trying to treat these three separate things as one whole, and they aren't. The second is the implication that Farmer Bob isn't paying for all of this, when he does through various taxes (or in the case of the first, paying registration fees and the like).
If the annual levy is troublesome to your sense of fairness, we might just tax upon sale.
It doesn't do anything about the fabrication of the "unimproved value" in such a system, but it avoids the absurd repeated taxation.
Every real-estate agent's "market valuation" includes the non-improved portion, and is almost always higher than what the state thinks the ground is worth. The state undervalues ground compared to the market
And this pattern would last
how many minutes if the governments involved had to derive all their revenues from unimproved value?
Look, if you want to shrug and say "yeah, it's going to be crooked", that's fair. There's no point in doing that
and trying to tell me that it will be OK.
Again, if it would help, we might collect the single tax only upon sale, where non-state forces determine the value.
Then you pretty much have to drop the whole stance of "unimproved value" versus "improved value", land vs. personal effort, don't you?
The state will always screw us. How can we limit its ability to do so?
For one thing, base taxation strictly on agreed-upon percentages of numbers the government can't manipulate. These, at least, are benefits of sales tax and flat income tax single-tax systems.
Dynamist | June 27, 2005, 10:32pm | #
Eric: Yes, whenever there's a state involved things will be "crooked". A Single Tax is subject to the same corrupting influences, but gives the state fewer levers to manipulate free choice.
The concept of unimproved value is common in real property transactions. The market can determine a total value, I think we agree. Private insurance and equity courts both have an ancient history of determining the value of built property, both in current condition and in replacement cost. If you have a mortgage to secure your note, these values are determined by whoever lends you the money. The difference between total value and current condition of improvements yields a sufficient approximation of what the ground under the structures is worth. (As always, there is an inescapable problem of corruption. The ST doesn't make people morally perfect.)
6Gun: I'm looking at land titles as a social guarantee of the right to occupy a patch of ground. The concept of "owning" the earth in our law was derived from the divine right of kings. That divine right is a social fiction. Whether the patch in question was claimed originally by an English king, bought from a French one, or taken by force from a Spanish one, it is all just an assertion of ownership.
Individual sovereignty implies a right to keep the product of one's effort, as a moral principle, but not a guarantee to occupy any particular patch of ground. The product of one's labor is personal property, while the product of nature claimed for oneself is real property. If one believes that all humans are created equal, they have an equal right to all the earth's bounty. The efforts expended to make that bounty useful are properly owned by whoever did the work.
There is an inconsistency in my thinking of which I am aware. My heart is individualist anarchist, with wealth going to whoever is wise or strong enough to defend it. Henry George, in
Progress made what I believe is an airtight argument that we all owe each other a share of what nature endowed. I hate the communist nature of the results, but I must accept the reasoning. There's still plenty of room for individuals to shine, and as a dynamist, I would love to see a world where "resource justice" prevailed.
Corporate profit is a convenient aggregation of individual effort. I believe an income tax is bogus, no matter if it is upon personal income directly, or indirectly through shared ownership. Again, the ST does nothing to remove the political impulse of the poor to punish the rich for their ability to better coordinate labor.
Finally (and this has been fun), it ties back to Kelo because the taking for public revenue depends upon taxing improvements. Under the ST, Kelo may still be faced with incentives to sell. What is different is how the justification for taking, to increase revenue, disappears when revenue comes only from public value (the unimproved portion resulting from proximity and infrastructure) in the first place.
Steve | June 28, 2005, 1:35am | #
OK, this conversation has drifted from the practical matters of public land use and fair compensation into some wierd world of advocating alternate tax systems.
Regarding this "single tax".
1. The ultimate improved value of a piece of property might be quite high, but that is not the market value of the property. My house might be worth $5 million if somebody was really bound and determined to tear down my living room to make way for the lobby of a skyscraper. However, there are many other places that skyscraper might go, and there are only so many skyscrapers, strip malls, movie theaters, car dealerships, etc. that the community can support. So the ultimate "improved value" is based on an often fictitious set of circumstances.
2. Taxes are not theft. I am a small-government conservative type and a property rights supporter, but taxes do support valuable public institutions. A society needs emergency services, public works, public benefits, education, national defense and lots of other uses that even a hard-core conservative would acknowledge. Taxes are the membership fee we all pay to live in a civilized society, as opposed to anarchy. Now, exactly what is a civilized society, and what benefits that society should provide, how those benefits are purchased and how the money to make the purchase should be raised are all valid points to debate. But to equate taxation, which is decided by the public at large or by their chosen representatives (often at considerable career risk to those representatives) with theft, which is the taking of something outside the rules of society, is ridiculous.
3. A stateless society has not existed since prehistory, and for good reason. States, for all their bureaucratic tendencies, are the only way to organize large scale efforts to preserve a culture. A cursory look at the last 500 years of colonial exploration and development will show what happens when isolated stateless communities are confronted by the power of a state-based society--ALWAYS the stateless are swept aside because they can't organize themselves, even when they hold many advantages in the defense of their traditions and homelands.
Statelessness was a fiction when it was proposed as the final stage of communism by Marx, and it is just as much a fiction today. The only question is whether we keep individual countries as we understand them today, or move to a "world government". However, those same state powers would still be accrued if the world was suddenly taken over by the UN or some other global body.
Getting to the actual case in hand, the Supreme Court ruling was badly flawed. By equating private ownership with "public use", the Supreme Court has opened dangerous new potentials for corporate/political abuse. Got a district of people opposed to your particular administration of a city? Condemn their property for some project and force them out of town. Need a way to get valuable land for below market price to jack up your corporate earnings? Propose a project to a city, offer lowball bids to the current owners, and then use eminent domain to clear out anyone who opposes you.
Sure, the commercial real estate industry would "rather not use eminent domain". Nobody likes having their company name mentioned in some newstory about driving grandma out of the house she has lived in for 70 years. But that won't keep them from using eminent domain or the threat of it to make a quick buck now that the floodgates are open.
6Gun | June 28, 2005, 10:32am | #
You miss the point, Steve, as does Dynamist, although going in another direction. A discussion of individual American property rights must include a discussion of personal obligation -- and it's inverse, or privilege -- within American society. In this way, not all taxes are created alike, nor will your parameter-less argument that they're flatly necessary be adequate.
I do not advocate statelessness either, but if Dynamist is going to take a reductionist stance that has at its core a fundamental "fiction" concerning personal property ownership, I will disagree. What the King of England did or didn't do (the American system superceded various crowns) is functionally irrelevant post the late 18th century, as is the empty theory of a landmass equally divisible among a certain number of citizens.
Reductionists would do well to recall the original
American system, that being the one in question and therefore the only one theoretically reformable. Under this system the private citizen originally had both the autonomy to own personal property and to enjoy the fruits of his labor unencumbered by the threat of his government's financial or social arms.
Thusly, it seems to me, an ED seizure of private property should, via this same reductionism, carry fundamentally different rules depending on the entities losing and receiving the property, which is obviously not the case. We've said little of the likely constitutional illegality of taking anything from the private citizen in the first place, except in the most extreme cases. We have a long ways to go to get back to a logical square one here.
Naturally, by 2005 we'd wandered far from the original ideals and principles: We've indentured ourselves to everything from personal tax to property tax to statist education (and all its compromises to personal freedom) to a million federal programs to ED. To argue that private property ownership and personal sovereignty in America are suddenly alien to our way of life is reductio ad absurdum. To argue that taxes are necessary but have no parameters that protect the private citizen is dangerous.
To argue that Kelo means there's nothing to worry about is just absurd.
6Gun | June 28, 2005, 1:52pm | #
You're right, joe; I was out of context. Let me explain.
In America, government is now bought by the highest lobbyist bidder. In America, the Constitution is dead and has been replaced by subjectivity. In America, the Supreme Court and countless others have lost their minds, as has the entire justice system.
In America, an allegation against a spouse or neighbor puts them in jail via mandatory arrest laws, or in Idaho's recent case, for mere allegations of "strangling". In Nevada, it's going to be illegal to file suit against a public servant. Two down, 48 left that I don't have personal knowledge of. Could things somehow be better there?
In America, it's legal to lose your property by a variety of means, your income by a variety of means. You can lose your career, self-sufficiency, and life. By a variety of means, all abetted by government.
In America, free speech is dying. Statist schools breed failure and indoctrinate the State's religion du jour. Hillarycare is right around the corner, and your 12 year-old kids are already answering the state's questionaires about
when they started oral sex and pot.
You can't drive, fly, pedal, hunt, fish, inhabit, travel, improve, erect, demolish, transact, medicate, treat, build, dispose, create, move, acquire information, diseminate information, speak, pray, vote, express opinion, or in some cases, take a shit under our half a million laws and regulations without either first checking in or flat breaking them.
When the neighbor kid says to me, against this background, that we'd be wise to trust history entirely outside of the protection of a dependable legal architecture and by way of his or her variable, opinionated subjectivity combined with that of the rest of the craven American amphitheatre, I tend to cringe.
When some son of a bitch from government says to me that we'd then be wise to trust contemporary local history entirely outside of the protection of a dependable legal architecture and by way of variable subjectivity, I tend to want to fight back.
I hope you never go there.
6Gun | June 28, 2005, 5:08pm | #
joe, you engage in a kind of constant selfish reductionism/subjectivity; it's all self-serving. This is at cross purposes with the public good and violates both logic and original principle.
For example:
...and also discourage renters from becoming homeowners?
The implication of which is that variable policy is and should be designed with only an eye toward fixing the short-term "problem", in this case that some item may negatively influence the private economic sector and probably requires central policy to correct it. Fine, IF you endorse government by popular acclaim or current belief.
...having an opportunity denied to you because you can't afford it isn't in any way a denial of freedom, or coercive.
That's an absolute, spoken as if it should be principle.
See the rational contradiction? Given that all short-term policies that deviate from a clear, fixed standard tend to victimize some and enrich others -- a point not lost on those getting the enriching -- then the latter view can never be principle. You have endorsed and aided a system with such a vast amount of cumbersome red tape and ability for legalized theft that "affordability" is entirely dependent on
it, and therefore
it can never rise to the level of pure principle.
Affordability is relative to the conditions brought about by excess government, not to the free market, therefore the principles of affordability are not absolute. Meanwhile you variable subjectivists refuse to examine the underlying affordability problem of excess regulation. Talk about backwards.
On the other hand, the principles of free markets and small, unobtrusive government ARE tried and proven, and under THEIR structure, ironically, affordability far more resembles a guarantee than it does today. Not "discouraging renters" is simply NONE of government's concern. At any level.
And this is just one of a million similar make-work, expense-creating examples.
Ends-variable reasoning is no substitute for solid foundational principle. Yet nanny-staters invariably invert the two so that ends-variable justifications take the place of principle and defenders of principle must somehow be expected to again prove history.
6Gun | June 29, 2005, 10:00am | #
Steve and CAT point out the folly of reductionism. That a discussion about ED ever got down into the relative morality of property ownership and windfalls and work product only takes the heat off ED reform. Dynamist, intentionally or otherwise, like joe, shows how constantly taking the issue out of either realistic or historical context harms freedom.
The bottom line is that there is now no way to insure that property rights
under the traditional American system of common law will be protected.
If we're going to play the reductionism game, reducing THAT major league problem down, for example, says that joe-philosophers would immediately lobby government to reform ED
because ED takes the wind out of the very capitalistic sails that built the damn urban centers in America.
If I, fish restaurateur, suddenly find my fish shack on the waterfront bulldozed in favor of a new stadium, I
may have my $500,000 to go buy another fish shack. But my new operation may flop completely because it's all about location, location, location.
Therefore, I take my $500,000, stick it offshore or under my mattress and try like hell to make it pay me a modest retirement. Repeat for every ED victim.
So much for capitalism.
And that's just ONE possible outcome. We can easily come up with a dozen practical reasons why ED sucks, NONE of which, like most of the reductionist's posts, address the simple fact that ED should just be a constitutional violation, be reformed, and leave it at that.
Constantly juggling subjective variables to try and solve (or deflect) this riddle is bullshit. In fact, it's how we got into this mess. Just keep government out of the private sector.
Dynamist | June 29, 2005, 1:28pm | #
I'm still lost as to the axe 6Gun is grinding on me. The best I've got is that abstracting something for discussion is some sort of mistake; that an idea must be presented in full detail all the time. If I'm close, read the book, not my posts. I'm suggesting that ED, which sucks even if it's in the Constitution, would be far less subject to abuse if the state didn't get a piece of what was put on the taken land.
Stevo: Your productive land is only worth more than the fruit you can eat
if you have a way to connect it to the city fruit market. That connectivity, the road upon which you drive your reefer, is a big part of what makes your land valuable. If you built the road, and owned all the aspects of the fruit market, you could keep all the money*. Until somebody builds the road, you lands is worth no rent. Who builds the road, if you don't (like in most cases)? The public-at-large, acting through the state. How would the road be funded? Either taking labor, as now, or taking rent from your now-valuable orchard, as George proposed.
The dandelions are similar to a spring in a desert, or an oil well. Just like the orchard, you depend on public works to release the value that nature creates. Gold and oil are both ingrained examples of speculation, and it is hard for me to argue past the emotion, even though I'm convinced by George's reasoning.
*which depends on the assumption that land titles are valid in the first place. Look into the history of land ownership, and you'll likely realize that titles are fictional. Although practical, and they've served us well, they're built upon nothing.
CAT's objections about enforcement depend upon where one draws line (borders). A nation/society can only protect the rights of its members, whatever system guides it. The ST works better if more land of different qualities is included, but its benefits have been seen on a very localized level. Even the current notion of residential land trusts strikes toward Georgists ideals (using the tax on labor to b
