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.
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)).
Posted by: Charley Foster | June 25, 2005 at 10:12 AM
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.
Posted by: Dave Tufte | June 27, 2005 at 11:32 AM