Spinning Out of Control. Radicals from both sides are taking over more and more of this country, leaving less and less of the middle ground for the rest of us to occupy.
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Item 1: Extreme Court. The United States Ext... Supreme Court ruled yesterday that it is just fine for governments to seize property from one private owner and turn it over to another private owner if they want to, using as justification that such transfer is in the public interest. I'm appalled and astonished that a supposedly "conservative" court would think it appropriate for government to steal private property because it's not producing enuf taxes, jobs, or any other rationalization.
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Just one day before the ruling, I raised this issue in the real-estate salespersons class I am taking, when the discussion came around to eminent domain. Like most people, I had a simplistic understanding of property rights before I started that course, thinking private ownership was pretty much absolute. Not so.
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We don't live in a historical vacuum. Our legal system evolved from and in opposition to the historic land-ownership system of medieval Western Europe, the feudal system, in which all land was deemed to be owned by the king, who permitted others to possess it for a time in exchange for various services. That is, he theoretically granted the right to a manorial lord to hold some of his land if that lord provided services to the sovereign, often in the form of fighting in the king's wars but also in the form of a levy of labor to build castles, defensive works, etc. ("public works", today). Our term "landlord" harkens back to that era.
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In theory, the lord held the land but did did own it, and upon his death, the land reverted to the king rather than being passed to the lord's own heirs. Under a weak monarch, that was more theoretical than real, and land passed as tho owned absolutely by the lord. Under a strong monarch, however, the king's control of land was very real indeed, and each new generation of landlords had to get the king's permission to continue in possession.
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Move to the present. The king has been replaced by society, "the public", represented by governments at the various levels we have created in this country: local (municipal), county, state, and federal, plus quasi-governmental agencies. When all is said and done, society owns the ultimate right of control over land, but permits individuals to own individual parcels for almost all purposes. The "bundle of rights" to land that a private owner enjoys is very large, but society retains four very important rights: (1) taxation; (2) eminent domain; (3) police power; and (4) escheat.
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(1) Taxation. Society has the right to levy taxes upon land, by means of which the public can finance the many things government does for the public good. Instead of owing the king personal service, we owe society money with which services can be purchased. If you don't pay those taxes, society has the right to compel payment or, as a last recourse, take back the property because you're not holding up your part of the bargain.
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(2) Eminent Domain. When society needs a given piece of land for "public use", it has the right to take it from you, but only if it gives you "just [fair] compensation", which is established by market value or, if there is a dispute as to value, by arbitration or court proceeding.
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(3) Police power is the right of society to ensure that what you do with property does not adversely affect other people's rights but contributes to social harmony and wellbeing. This is how government gets the right to zone different areas for different uses and set building codes, health codes, and the like to control what happens on private property.
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(4) Escheat, finally, is the right of society to resume ownership of land abandoned by a private owner or left with no owner by virtue of the death of an owner who has no heirs.
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So the right to own land is not absolute. It is conditioned by the reality that "No man is an island" but part of society, which is deemed the ultimate owner of the land.
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That does not, however, mean that society, acting thru any government or quasi-governmental agency, can just take your land without compensation or for insufficient cause in terms of the public interest. Eminent domain has long been used to create space for highways, schools, parks, and other governmental structures, and most people accept that those things have to go somewhere, so somebody has to sell if there is no appropriate vacant land to be had.
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The problem we have recently been presented with, however, is that from "public use", we have moved to "public good" as the standard for taking. That is a very slippery slope.
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Hard-pressed localities may have a small assessed valuation for all the properties within their boundaries, as would not permit them to raise much in the way of revenue from existing taxpayers. They are not always content to live within their means nor find some other way to raise needed funds, as by an income tax, sales tax, or selling public property.
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Some governments find themselves responsible for severely depressed areas that provide little in the way of tax revenue but demand much in the way of expense, for schools, police, fire protection, health services, drug treatment, and a whole laundry list of social needs. So they want to redevelop and replace low-yield property owners with high-yield. How far can they go?
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My own city, Newark, has a high ratio of nontaxable land, occupied by governments (we are a county seat and site of major public buildings for city, county, state, and federal government offices and courts), colleges (we have 48,000 higher education students, more than there are students in the public schools K-12), churches, and various nonprofit organizations, from hospitals and community development organizations to museums and performing arts centers. What do we seize for redevelopment?
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We have a lot of storefront churches. Should we seize them and force them to go elsewhere or consolidate operations in a major church center? Could we even do that, given the First Amendment's protection of religion?
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Should we shut down the Newark Museum or NJPAC, the New Jersey Institute of Technology or Essex County College? Knock down the courthouses and hospitals? That wouldn't serve the public good. But there is prime real estate along a major Downtown roadway, Mulberry Street, that is underperforming, so the City wants to seize it and turn it over to a private developer who will build high-end condominiums and high-density housing where there are now only low-end small businesses. Is that fair?
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I don't think so.
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The case decided yesterday by the Extreme Court arose from an attempted seizure of 15 houses against the will of the owners in New London, Connecticut, a city that has fallen on hard times. I've been to New London, for the wedding many years ago of one of my brothers, whose first wife came from there. It's an old city, and I value old cities. But there's got to be another way to revive New London, or Newark, or any other town or village in this country, without uprooting "the little guy" for the benefit of rich developers.

City officials envision a commercial development including a riverfront hotel, health club and offices that would attract tourists to the Thames riverfront, complementing the adjoining Pfizer center and a proposed Coast Guard museum.

How nice. But the way the free market is supposed to work is that if that is an economically viable plan, a private developer will just do it without asking government to steal property from unwilling sellers. He will negotiate an agreed price and build on suchever land as he can buy, adjusting plans around any parcel he cannot buy.
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One of the most striking examples of a major developer altering its plans to accommodate holdout owners is the centerpiece of New York's Rockefeller Center, the 70-story art-deco skyscraper designated 30 Rockefeller Plaza (formerly the RCA Building, now the GE Building). People familiar with the Avenue of the Americas side of that structure know that there are two little non-deco buildings at the corners that were not demolished but survive in the shadow of their colossal neighbor. After much hunting thru Google and Google Images, I found this picture of one of them, on the 49th Street corner opposite Radio City Music Hall (at http://fotot.jarvenpaa.net/fi/0000000146):

Note the little brown building to the right of the Radio City marquee. There is a pair to it, but gray, on the 48th Street corner, bookending the enormous tower over them. Here's a photo (from http://www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/bigmap/manhattan/midtown/rockefellercenter) of that other little building, called "Hurley's Holdout" for the bar that occupied the ground floor at the time.

The Rockefeller Center project wasn't stopped by the refusal of the owners of these two small buildings to sell. It was adjusted, and so tastefully that most people don't even notice that 30 Rock does not occupy the entire "Sixth Avenue" blockfront.
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That's what should happen whenever and wherever there is not a match between a willing buyer and a willing seller. The would-be buyer builds what he can with what he is entitled to own. He does not strong-arm unwilling sellers or get the government to steal their property and hand it over to him.
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That is our tradition, and that is the way things have always worked until very recently, when high-handed local governments decided they have no respect for private property but will jump-start economic development, and get themselves a richer property-tax base, simply by seizing one person's property and turning it over to another, who will create a bigger ratable on it.
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If a public entity wants to build public housing, that's one thing. But don't steal land from Peter and give it to Paul.
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If government took private property for publicly owned corporations that are doing things ordinarily done by private entities (e.g., building market-value condos), that would be seen as just plain wrong, downright "Communist".
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What is it, however, when government seizes property from one private owner to give it to another private owner, ostensibly to advance public purposes — that is, government in effect hands over public power to private companies? Corporatism? Sort of. Neo-corporatism? Sort of. Corporatocracy? Sort of, especially inasmuch as that entails risks of bribery to influence government action, an objection raised in the New London Supreme Court case. Plainly rich corporations have more economic leverage to get their way, over or under the table, than do private homeowners or small business owners, and many public officials are more than happy to take "campaign contributions" to listen to the concerns of contributors.
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However, maybe "fascism", with a lowercase-"f", is the best term for our emerging public-private polity (even if it too is not quite right) because private companies are inflicting the crushing power of the state intended only to advance the "public good", upon people who think that the public good is best served when the rights of all those many people who constitute the public are staunchly preserved.
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But perhaps we need a new term, one that addresses the ever-increasing shift of public power to private or quasi-private (usually called "quasi-governmental") entities, like regulatory agencies, port authorities, and "public corporations", that are ruled by people who are not elected and not subject to day-to-day control by elected officials.
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Alas, most people in the cities of this country don't take much interest in local government, and may either not vote at all or vote blindly, from name recognition. So even if elected officials were to have ostensible control over quasi-private development corporations, those public officials are themselves not really controlled by the electorate, but are free agents, at liberty to turn a blind eye to abuses because they will never be held to account for the actions of private or even quasi-governmental corporations to which they have transferred public power.
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This is becoming a very serious problem in our democracy, and needs to be addressed.
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All entities that exert governmental power must be brought under the control of the electorate. Trusting your rights to courts is, as we saw yesterday, a very risky proposition.
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(A 7-page discussion of the issues in the New London case, written before yesterday's ruling, appears at "Economic Development, Eminent Domain and the Property Rights Movement".
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Item 2: The Commies Are Coming! The Commies Are Coming! The Government of Communist China is trying to buy Unocal, the ninth largest oil company in the United States, via its state-owned oil company, CNOOC Ltd. Four U.S. Senators are alarmed, and want the Treasury Department to look very carefully at the security aspects of the proposed deal. Radical free-marketeers are pooh-poohing such concerns:

"This is not a company building military aircraft or missile technology. This is energy, at the end of the day," said Lawrence Goldstein, president of the nonprofit Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York.

Oh? And what exactly can you do with a military aircraft or missile without fuel? And how do you make a military aircraft or missile without energy?
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This is far from the first attempt by the Communist Chinese government to purchase major U.S. assets — with our own money, transferred by U.S. corporations to Communist China via a massive trade deficit that has, in the past decade, poured ONE TRILLION U.S. dollars into Communist China. There is also, pending, a proposed purchase of major-appliance maker Maytag, and

Chinese computer maker Lenovo's $1.75 billion purchase of IBM's personal computer division was cleared by a U.S. federal panel in March. * * *

Oil analyst Fadel Gheit at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York said it would be the "pinnacle of hypocrisy'' for the United States to put roadblocks in CNOOC's way, considering that President George W. Bush and others in his administration have repeatedly scolded Russia for not opening its doors wide enough to U.S. oil companies.

"American companies must expand globally, but if we cut off people from coming into our country other countries will just block our companies from doing the same," Gheit said.

Oh? But earlier in that article appears this warning:

"It's not a business transaction at all," said C. Richard D'Amato, chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional advisory panel. "This is not a free market deal. This is the Chinese government acquiring energy resources."

Mr. D'Amato left out a word: "Communist" — "Chinese Communist government". Butchers of Beijing. The people who have starkly increased their military spending every year, year after year, in preparation for a war against us.
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How many times do we have to quote Lenin to wake people to the dangers we create for ourselves when we do business-as-usual with Communists?

The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,735.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:15 PM