Well, by now it’s been all over the blogosphere since this morning, Our Robed Masters sided with the City of New London in the Kelo case. Don Boudreaux, as usual, has one of the better posts on the matter. There’s also Zywicki (at the VC, be sure to scroll), Reason, and any number of other posts. I think Tyler Cowen sums it up best with “This is just awful…”
And why is it so very awful? Well, as Boudreaux says:
Consider the lamentable U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down today in the case of Kelo v. City of New London. In it, the Supreme Court (well, five of its members) ruled that local governments can seize property from private citizen A and give it to private citizen B if it, the government – the gaggle of force-specialists – declares publicly a belief that such seizures will create jobs and increase the amount of money the force-specialists will succeed in forcibly extracting from non-force-specialists.
That is what’s so awful. It is now formally true in the United States of America that your home can be forcibly taken from you, against your will, for whatever compensation the state deems worthy, so that some other person who the state likes more can use the land. It’s a bloody sad day when I can be evicted from a house I purchased from the previous owner, at whatever price the local government decides is “fair”, so that they can put up a strip mall to increase tax revenues.
And that, kids, is the real kicker: tax revenues are now a “public use” all on their own. Does it matter what happens with them? Nope, so long as the new use will increase tax revenues it’s kosher. SCOTUS has really screwed the pooch on this one, and the liberal justices have proven that they will expand governmental power for no other reason than a love for collectivism.
