Recent Supreme Court Ruling

[tylerdurden]

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I have not (yet) read the specifics of the case.

I was under the impression that the project was a waterfront development project that would include shops and other businesses as opposed to transferring it to another entity.[/QUOTE]

Wait, talking land from individual homeowners for a waterfront development project isn't "transferring it to another entity"???


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If it is to simply hand the property over to (say) Pfizer for a new office building or whatever, then indeed this was a terrible decision (at all levels, from the local government and up).

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Why is a waterfront development more acceptable than an office building??

[Triumph36]

I'm sorry but this is nonsense. Try holding 'your' land without a government. You can only hold as much land as you can defend, and that's not very much. Plus you have absolutely no right to it since you've only claimed it; you have no context to claim it in. Property rights therefore cannot be absolute since there is no judge to adjucate propety disputes.

Hobbes goes so far as to say government has the right to take your land whenever it likes because it's not yours in the first place. This is fallacious. However, without eminent domain, a necessary and unjust rule, we would not have superhighways through cities, and many other necessities to function as a society. Holding an idea like 'property rights are absolute' is not only anti-society, it also contradicts the world you and I live in.

[tylerdurden]

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I'm sorry but this is nonsense. Try holding 'your' land without a government. You can only hold as much land as you can defend, and that's not very much.

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If someone robs me at gunpoint, that doesn't give them the "right" to my property, it only gives them control of it.

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Plus you have absolutely no right to it since you've only claimed it; you have no context to claim it in.

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No, I've added my labor to the land, which gives me a property right to it. Now if someone else already owned that land, or if I used illegitimate tools to improve the land, I would not have a legitimate right to it.

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Property rights therefore cannot be absolute since there is no judge to adjucate propety disputes.

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Why do I need someone else to adjucate? Where does this judge's power come from?

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However, without eminent domain, a necessary and unjust rule, we would not have superhighways through cities, and many other necessities to function as a society.

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If there is a demand, the market will provide. Why is government, and it's abusive emminent domain thuggery, needed to build a highway?

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Holding an idea like 'property rights are absolute' is not only anti-society, it also contradicts the world you and I live in.

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Emminent domain is a fact of life. Saying it's wrong doesn't contradict the world we live in, it just points out that there is injustice. How is stealing someone's property LESS anti-social than holding property rights as fundamental?

[Triumph36]

What grants you that right? You're saying something so nebulous as 'your labor' gives you the 'right' to property absent of a government? If someone robs you at gunpoint, it doesn't give you the 'right' to your 'property', but in that situation there is no such thing as robbery and no such thing as rights.

'The market will provide'? What a catch-all phrase. Sounds like you belong in the Politics forum. The market will not provide for such a demand, not when there are people who will not sell for ANY price. Indistinct things such as markets do not factor in old people who don't want or need money and only want to live in the place they've lived their whole lives.

It's not 'stealing' someone's property. The people are compensated, although perhaps not always justly. It is taking it for the greater good, with usually several years of court proceedings to ensure it is for the greater good. It is unfortunately necessary in a world where demand and free-markets cannot possibly control or explain all the interactions of men.

[tylerdurden]

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It's not 'stealing' someone's property. The people are compensated, although perhaps not always justly.

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So if I take your new car, but give you some decreed market price for it, even though you didn't want to sell it, it's not stealing? How is it any different when the government does it?

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It is taking it for the greater good, with usually several years of court proceedings to ensure it is for the greater good.

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The motivation doesn't change the fact that it's stealing.

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It is unfortunately necessary in a world where demand and free-markets cannot possibly control or explain all the interactions of men.

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It's necessary in a world where some men wish to exert control and power over others.

[Bill Murphy]

"This is what happens when liberals appoint activist judges."

Ford(Stevens), Bush I(Souter), & Reagan(Kennedy).

[tylerdurden]

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Sounds like you belong in the Politics forum.

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Um, this IS the politics forum.

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The market will not provide for such a demand, not when there are people who will not sell for ANY price. Indistinct things such as markets do not factor in old people who don't want or need money and only want to live in the place they've lived their whole lives.

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These people can be routed around. They don't own the whole world. What difference does it make, anyway? The old geezer owns his land, if he wants to stay there, then too bad for you. Go find someone else to boss around.

[MMMMMM]

Good analysis here (in my opinion):

[b]"Property rites
Thomas Sowell

June 27, 2005

You may own your own home and expect to live there the rest of your life. But keep your bags packed, because the Supreme Court of the United States has decreed that local politicians can take your property away and turn it over to someone else, just by using the magic words "public purpose."

We're not talking about the government taking your home in order to build a reservoir or a highway for the benefit of the public. The Constitution always allowed the government to take private property for "public use," provided the property owner was paid "just compensation."

What the latest Supreme Court decision does with verbal sleight-of-hand is change the Constitution's requirement of "public use" to a more expansive power to confiscate private property for whatever is called "public purpose" -- including turning that property over to some other private party.

In this case -- Kelo v. New London -- the private parties to whom the government would turn over confiscated properties include a hotel, restaurants, shops, and a pharmaceutical company.

These are not public uses, as the Constitution requires, but are said to serve "public purposes," as courts have expanded the concept beyond the language of the 5th Amendment -- reflecting those "evolving" circumstances so dear to judges who rewrite the Constitution to suit their own tastes.

No sane person has ever denied that circumstances change or that laws need to change to meet new circumstances. But that is wholly different from saying that judges are the ones to decide which laws need changing and in what way at what time.

What are legislatures for except to legislate? What is the separation of powers for except to keep legislative, executive and judicial powers separate?

When the 5 to 4 Supreme Court majority "rejected any literal requirement that condemned property be put into use for the general public" because of the "evolving needs of society," it violated the Constitutional separation of powers on which the American system of government is based.

When the Supreme Court majority referred to its "deference to legislative judgments" about the taking of property, it was as disingenuous as it was inconsistent. If Constitutional rights of individuals are to be waved aside because of "deference" to another branch of government, then the citizens may as well not have Constitutional rights.

What are these rights supposed to protect the citizens from, if not the government?

This very Court, just days before, showed no such deference to a state's law permitting the execution of murderers who were not yet 18. Such selective "deference" amounts to judicial policy-making rather than the carrying out of the law.

Surely the Justices must know that politicians whose whole careers have been built on their ability to spin words can always come up with some words that will claim that there is what they can call a "public purpose" in what they are doing.

How many private homeowners can afford to litigate such claims all the way up and down the judicial food chain? Apartment dwellers who are thrown out on the street by the bulldozers are even less able to defend themselves with litigation.

The best that can be said for the Supreme Court majority's opinion is that it follows -- and extends -- certain judicial precedents. But, as Justice Clarence Thomas said in dissent, these "misguided lines of precedent" need to be reconsidered, so as to "return to the original meaning of the Public Use Clause" in the Constitution.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's dissent points out that the five Justices in the majority -- Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, Stevens, and Kennedy -- "wash out any distinction between private and public use of property." As a result, she adds: "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."

In other words, politicians can replace your home with whatever they expect will pay more taxes than you do -- and call their money grab a "public purpose."

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/t...20050627.shtml

[tylerdurden]

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Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's dissent points out that the five Justices in the majority -- Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, Stevens, and Kennedy -- "wash out any distinction between private and public use of property."

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That's the money quote.