Fast Fiction

This is one of the scariest rulings I’ve seen come out of the Supreme Court in my lifetime. The Supreme Court ruled that local governments may seize people’s homes and businesses—even against their will—for private economic development.

Total control over these seizures is handled by the city. So, if you’ve never paid attention to your city council, now’s the time to. You’d better make damn sure they have your best interests at heart and not some developers under the guise that it’s fo the “tax base.”

Of course the other option is to never own property in anyplace desireable.

The justices in the majority on this were Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. I’m totally baffled by who voted on which side. Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her dissent, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

The other dissenting votes were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, as well as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

UPDATE: As I’ve read more I have further thoughts. In that article it addresses one of the questions I had, just what the public good has to do with tax bases? Is a government obligated to create a tax base? Is a strong tax base actually part of the common good? Is a government’s obligation to make money so it can spend it on the public? In the case in New London, the community was not blighted, what they were replacing it with had no more “community” value than the homes that were there, but the fact that they were putting in businesses that might help the depressed economy were what swung it in the developer’s favor.

I just see this whole thing as being a huge temptation for corruption, especially in smaller communities.