Supreme Court OKs Protection Rackets

Thursday's Kelo vs. New London Supreme Court decision in favor of New London is summed up by Antonin Scalia question from February's oral arguments:

[So,] you can take from A and give to B if B pays more taxes?

Can someone please tell me how this is any different from an organized crime ring scaring customers away from a store that doesn't pay enough protection money?

Knowledge Problem has the best roundup of this that I've seen so far.

UPDATE: A more detailed and earlier take on the same idea appears here.

Lastly, Julian Sanchez sees through the smoke and mirrors to where this may take us:

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.

Comments

[Charley Foster]

It’s not just about taking from the poor to give to the rich. It cuts the other way too. In fact, one of two landmark Court decisions signaling a shift in the standard from actual “public use” to mere “public purpose” upheld a statute in Hawaii allowing the state to condemn property owned by landlords and convey it to tenants. The state claimed property was too highly concentrated in the hands of a few owners and the public purpose of the legislation was to correct a perceived malfunctioning land market. O’Connor wrote the decision. (Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 467 U.S. 229 (1984)).

[Dave Tufte]

I had heard about this. I have two thoughts.

1) What we are seeing here may be richness in political power as opposed to money.
2) Hawaii may be a special case, given the concentration of power from it's colonial stage.