I wrote: "Who can take property is not a local issue."
You responded: "It absolutely is if the use of the land is local. If it were, say, railroads stretching from coast to coast it would be a national issue."
This is one of those cases where federalism will result in a result so perverse that most advocates of federalism would balk at carrying it this far.
Unlimited local power to condemn property and take it, so long as just compensation is paid, is now the law of the land in the United States. This is likely to become odious to people across the land within a few years' time, and there will be a push to federalize the issue to stop the parade of abuses which are as certain to follow as night follows day.
If you do not have the principle that private land can only be taken for direct government use, but rather have the principle that organized local powers can take land and resell it for profit, with "just compensation" to be decided by themselves, then you will have abuse after abuse.
And since that is now the law, you will have abuse after abuse after abuse. Structurally, the problem is that there is no national limit on what a "public use" is.
The national money is controlled by a private bank. Even the Post Office is a quasi-private corporation. Many public utilities have been sold and are now corporations. This is done to reduce the size of gov't, yet the services are still required and continue to be expanded [by citizen request, BTW].
These are a species of public use, but outside the operation of the gov't itself. The State itself is far more than the gov't, and always has been, it is just that we see a few things from time to time that cause alarm because we have allowed these services to move outside direct control of the republic.
One caution I would recommend is that you should not extrapolate opinions expressed on Free Republic to represent the United States as a whole. This is not a slam at Free Republic, but rather at the complacency of the electorate as a whole. Specifically, nationwide approval of the Supreme Court still hovers above the 60th percentile. If overall disapproval of the courts were as rampant as you incorrectly perceive, then things would be changed by the legislatures - which are the ultimate arbiters - via Constitutional amendment.
This is not a statement on the merit of any court decision, but on your assessment of the US Constitutional system.
PS. And a significant part of the problem is that the other branches of our government have become as corrupted by power as the courts, and the people by and large don't care. The trajectory won't change until enough people identify the problem as the government overall, rather than merely the partisans on the other side. Most Americans want government to be the solution, they just squabble over what needs solving.
A house divided against itself cannot stand, and the people are intractably divided. A government by its very nature seeks to exercise power and to extinguish freedom. When eternal vigilance falters, it is ever at the ready to enter the breach. That's just the way it is.