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June 29, 2005

The Sanctity of Liberty

 

 

 

The latest volley in quid pro quo has started. Potentially corrupt local governments, paying back their contributors and pocket-liners and terrorizing ordinary citizens or worse: punishing small business and home owners who are politically active on the "wrong" side of the last election, all under the guise of eminent domain. The now infamous ruling's majority opinion, which granted carte blanche to this of course was rendered by Justice Souter (who himself now faces an ironic personal dilemma of sorts). But as we know, it is no small thing for the ordinary citizen to pack up and move. Often times they cannot find a safe, fair place to move at the price given for their property. At the very least, they should be given the prospective commercial value, since that is exactly what it will become. If instead the private business interested in the land wished to purchase it from the property owner, it would be forced to pay that commercial price. So thanks to the ruling, these businesses in collusion with local government working against the private citizen (the very citizen those governments were created to protect) get the biggest steal of their lives.

 

All this thanks to that supreme court ruling you all have been reading and hearing so much about - a ruling the effects of which will make Tammany Hall look like clergy. Gone it seems is the notion that “every man should be supposed a knave”, who holds such governmental power, and therefore limited and checked in the applications' scope, now replaced with the broadest and most dangerous notions and official acts of social promotion known in the free world.

 

The other problem with this, as Bruce of Constitution Cowboy blog points out in a comment at Cam Edwards site, is that "This will create an elite class in this country... whomever is politically connected will be able to grab just about anything their nefarious thieving heart desires".

 

Though there has always been high and low social strata, there has been, of particular noteworthiness, a strong middle class in this country as well. The problem with this abuse of imminent domain as Bruce points out is also a factor because the middle class is already on the decline in this country today due to suppression of wages via outsourcing and the government's winking at sub-waged illegal immigrants who may prove similarly damaging to the middle class and political stability of our country that slaves proved for the stability of the Roman republic. (In case you don't know, after Rome began its conquests, it started bringing back loot and slaves captured whenever a foreign city was overthrown. These slaves began to supplant the lower-waged positions, suppressing medium wages, causing unemployment and shrinking the middle class.)

 

Plato was aware of the acute need for a strong middle class too, which is why he said no democracy could survive without one. Stability, he said, was found in the sensibilities of the middle class because only the middle class truly benefits from constancy, stability and popular liberty. Both the very poor and very wealthy tend to want more drastic, destabilizing changes. Yet all this seems lost on our federal government today, history a forgotten ghost of irritation to those careening without headlights like madmen down a mountain road for which they refused beforehand to even prepare themselves.

 

Someone asked today, I believe it was Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox News, where the idea of small government has gone. But I wonder if that is not the only of the 7 ghosts of the Reagan era that we have forgotten. The other six of course being a love for the country of our Founders, individual liberty, individual sovereignty and dignity, common sense national security, economic liberty via low taxes (remember, “the power to tax is the power to destroy” – John Marshall - McCulloch v. Maryland) and the distaste for an over inflated bureaucracy. Certainly the power now to take away property and give it to a potential political benefactor is a worse destruction yet for all things of liberty and America. Justice Morrison Remick Waite, quoting Marshall in Citizens’ Savings & Loan Association v. City of Topeka, took it even further:

 

The power to tax is, therefore, the strongest, the most pervading of all the powers of government, reaching directly or indirectly to all classes of the people… A striking instance of the truth of the proposition is seen in the fact that the existing tax of ten per cent. imposed by the United States on the circulation of all other banks than the National banks, drove out of existence every [87 U.S. 655, 664]   State bank of circulation within a year or two after its passage. This power can as readily be employed against one class of individuals and in favor of another, so as to ruin the one class and give unlimited wealth and prosperity to the other, if there is no implied limitation of the uses for which the power may be exercised.

 

To lay with one hand the power of the government on the property of the citizen, and with the other to bestow it upon favored individuals to aid private enterprises and build up private fortunes, is none the less a robbery because it is done under the forms of law and is called taxation. This is not legislation. It is a decree under legislative forms.

 

I suppose Ronald Reagan, were he alive today, wouldn't have stopped with the remark, “The taxpayer; that's someone who works for the federal government, but doesn't have to take a civil service examination.” Instead he might have added it seems today the taxpayer is offered thanks with an eviction notice. Next time he will be sure to contribute to the right campaign.

 

For more information on the issue of property rights and what your state legislatures and state courts may or should be doing to protect you (Georgia has already enacted just such a measure), visit the Castle Coalition website: http://www.castlecoalition.org/

 

See also: Taking a Wrecking Ball to Property Rights Collin Levey at Jewish World Review

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Martin at June 29, 2005 08:40 PM

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