Evolution of eminent domain is the story of the power of Supreme Court to alter American culture

The evolution of eminent domain is the story of the lasting power of Supreme Court decisions to alter the American cultural fabric

For generations, the descendants of Bahamian conch fishermen and their families have lived in Riviera Beach, Florida. They would like to stay there, in part because Riviera Beach is one of the few affordable waterfront towns remaining in the state. But in all probability, they will not be able to.

Over the winter, the city council approved the development of "Harbor Village" by commercial yachting, shipping and tourism companies. The project would involve razing about 1,000 homes.

The Riviera Beach families are not alone. Across the US, towns, cities and state governments are allowing businesses to acquire private property by stretching state and federal constitutions. It sounds like a tale of bigfoot capitalism. But it is really a tale of bigfoot government. It is also a reminder of how Supreme Court rulings can alter the fabric of social life over decades.

The nominal goal of projects such as Harbor Village is economic development. But while new stadiums or new malls may make political sense, not all of them generate the growth or social benefit they promise. Indeed, a similar development in Riviera Beach - albeit on a smaller scale - foundered earlier. And public sector greed is at work: municipalities hope their projects will bring revenue for their coffers.

The trend, being local, is hard to resist at a national level. But there has been one effort, known as the Castle Coalition, as in "My home is my castle" (www.castlecoalition.org), backed by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal group. Its allies include both individual property owners and Green parties in some states.

The story begins with the nation's founders, who feared "the despotic power" of either the British Crown or a new federal government to assail property rights. In the fifth amendment of the US constitution, they wrote: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation". The states duly replicated the terminology in their constitutions.

The issue is the meaning of "public use". It used to be clear: military bases, highways and so on. But over the years, cities began expanding the notion of "public use" to include "a public purpose" and even "public benefit". Some used it to justify levelling poor neighbourhoods in order to build something better.

In this, they won crucial Supreme Court backing. In a 1954 case, Berman vs Parker, the court ruled that an urban renewal project involving the compulsory transfer of families' and landlords' property to developers in south-west Washington was allowable under the constitution because it represented slum clearance. This ruling led to many others by lower courts, making possible the widespread urban renewal programmes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Matters were made all the easier by the fact that many of the properties at issue were rentals. Slum landlords made easy targets. Indeed, the expropriation of landlords enjoyed wide political backing. This was the US version of Latin American land reform.

But the tower blocks that supplanted smaller-scale homes did not improve the quality of life. On the contrary, they soon became centres of crime more dangerous than anything that had preceded them. The shift prompted Jane Jacobs to write The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a 1960s eulogy for lost neighbourhoods. Today, any number of redevelopments and public housing projects - Chicago's South Side being a prime example- are now regarded as the cause of blight, rather than the cure. The tendency is now to help the poor become homeowners, because property is viewed as the key to social mobility.

Despite this, "public purpose" and "public benefit" legal actions continued unabated. Indeed, there was a further change. Rather than merely claiming blighted land for urban renewal projects, local governments began to claim all types of property on behalf of private businesses. The argument was that those businesses would be able to put the land to better economic use.

Sometimes "public benefit" condemnations are really about simple business competition. The saddest example of abuse was the city of Detroit's decision in the early 1980s to raze a working-class neighbourhood, Poletown, in order to allow General Motors to expand its manufacturing facility. Poletown was not a slum; it merely blocked an opportunity for Detroit to please GM.

Then there was the Archie family, which lived for generations on a 24-acre plot near Jackson, Mississippi, then was ordered off its property to make way for a Nissan plant. The Archies were offered compensation but, as Alonzo Archie noted, this was not the point: "You can buy a house but you cannot buy a home."

The Archies sued and the state and Nissan backed down. But such an outcome tends to be rare. In general, the cards are stacked in favour of governments and their corporate allies. "Who is for expropriation and redevelopment? All the leaders of the town," says Scott Bullock, a lawyer who works with the Castle Coalition and the Institute for Justice. Local politicians, businesses and even the press tend to cheerlead for redevelopment. What is more, small landowners can rarely afford strong legal representation if they want to fight developments.

There's no trend in state and local government that scares me the way this one does.

Governments have moved from funding police and emergency services, universally conceded as indispensable even by those who dispute their public nature, to funding a huge range of activities that have nothing to do with the basic purposes of government (in the name of the "public welfare," of course), to outrightly seizing property from some and handing it to others on the grounds that the new owners will make more profitable use of it.

This is not government except in name. This is legalized plunder: grand larceny under color of law.

Frederic Bastiat told us in his 1850 pamphlet The Law to recognize State plunder by a simple test: Would we consider it plunder if private persons were to do it? Can there be any doubt that these exercises of the condemnation power qualify as plunder by Bastiat's test? Indeed, can there be any doubt that, if these things be tolerated, then there is no longer private property of any kind in the United States?

Fear for your homes and businesses. Fear for your country.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com

Here's another one from the same source:

People get frustrated when they don’t get what they want, especially when they believe that their combined individual desires justify a collective claim upon the use of private property. To enforce such a claim by political compulsion is to own without title or payment. It is a tragic outfall of history that those who popularized the exercise of a collective claim on the use of private property were motivated to acquire personal control by means of political dominance. To acquire dominance then requires no more investment than to persuade a critical mass of the popula-tion according to the fashion of the moment.

These fashions can grow without limit and can be combined into functional majorities. Once democratic acquisition of the use of property is codified under the power of government, commons are forever subject to political control. Economic goods that originate from the land become desired for the collective perception of individual benefit, because the cost is but a whim.

The asset, the environment, has been thus devalued to little more than that.

First, people want to control a view, then they want it as a place to hike, then protection for fish, a wetland for migratory birds, a watershed to control all erosion, or to add a buffer zone to reduce encounters with bears. Then they want it to be closed to all public entry so that they don’t feel guilty, then they want it connected to a corridor to transmit genetic variability, then they want a whole forest region as a carbon sink, then a mountain range as a bio-zone for the expres-sion of spiritual life forces, then…

Given that the ability to gain personal control of commons is based upon the ability to make a political sale, there are several prerequisites:

A simple justification to maximize the applicability of the claim to individual perceptions and desires.
A majority perception that acquisition comes at minimal personal cost.
Collective benefits that are difficult to measure or long deferred.
Powerful beneficiaries with sufficient personal interest and resources to fund and execute the taking.
Control of communications media to influence majority opinion then becomes the cheapest means to control factors of production and the key to controlling wealth.

Does the need to maintain a sense of crisis lead to shortsighted decisions? Does it lead to the unconscious realization of self-fulfilling prophecies? Does it create a smokescreen for the exercise of corrupt intent? Does it overtax the ability to generate capital? If we adopt an ill-conceived plan, could such an exercise irreversibly damage the resource? Could the repeated application of mechanics like this lead to the unwitting vengeance of self-destruction?

There are those who have come to regard the exercise of external claims upon private property as a structural evil, a distorted exercise in “ends” justification for personal gratification disguised as altruism. It is truly curious that the same people, who warn us that the cause of ecological problems is a lack of individual motivation to care for commons, propose solutions that are in structural antipathy to maximizing the value of the assets. The very act of collectivizing the factors of production has historically destroyed their value. That loss can propagate rapidly. People get desperate because the process of political acquisition of private property is unsustainable.

Is it possible that property rights, as a matter of natural law and as protected by the Fifth Amendment, are really that important? If the price for the control of land resources is but the deflection of the winds of political fashion, the available wealth to support, defend, and nurture the land is minimized. What ends up forgotten in the political acquisition of “commons” is the need to maximize the economic value of these goods to the land. With the declining public perception of marginal benefit is a declining marginal value of the land itself. You can plot the price on a graph, as you will see in Part II.

When are we going to say enough is enough?

People don't have the backbone to stand up to the government any more. That is precisly why our founders warned against standing armies. Remember what happened last time a group of people decided to stand up to the feds...remember Waco? Any of our homes (especially if we own over and acre or two) will be termed a "compound" when the news media broadcasts our deaths at the hands of the BATF, CPS, FBI or local LEO. Things are going to have to get a LOT worse than they are now before the majority of the sheople will band together and say ENOUGH. Sadly, by the time this happens, peaceful solutions may be out of the question. ALL freedoms and libery are based on the inherent right to OWN and CONTROL property. If the government can seize your property for not paying them a yearly tribute (taxes), you do NOT own or control your property. You are paying rental for the priviledge of maintaining it and we have been doing so for years. This was proabably the main reason that only property owners were allowed the vote during our founding era. It was realized that only those who owned property had a REAL, vested interest in controlling government and making certain that it didn't outgrow its Constitutional limits.

Does it create a smokescreen for the exercise of corrupt intent? Does it overtax the ability to generate capital?

One of the top worst government policies promoted by politicians and bureaucrats is the income tax.. How ignorant or incompetent does a person need to be to tax productivity; to burden that which creates and produces the goods and services that human survival depends on and that creates jobs and prosperity? Especially since logic, common sense and law of free markets show that if a tax must be laid it should be on consumption, not production. One method of taxation, the graduated income tax, violates individual rights and private property rights, the other, consumption tax, upholds them.

As it is now, the intent of politicians and bureaucrats is corruption.

It is truly curious that the same people, who warn us that the cause of ecological problems is a lack of individual motivation to care for commons, propose solutions that are in structural antipathy to maximizing the value of the assets.

Parasitical elite tell us that to care for the commons that a graduated income tax is the fairest and most beneficial means to collect the funds to care for the commons. They're lying and they know it. They must maintain the lie so that they continue receiving funds to continue their corruptions and to dole out money to a large list of corrupt-form-the-roots alphabet agencies. In short, they create problems that need not exist.

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