Dead Cant Rant

Mike Greenberg showed his stupid side in yesterday’s Express-News, in a column about the eminent domain decision:

Here’s the case in a nutshell: The economically distressed city of New London, Conn., hatched a revitalization plan for the Fort Trumbull area calling for a new marina, a waterfront hotel and a U.S. Coast Guard Museum, plus residential, retail and office space.

Okay, we’ve now established what happened: New London wanted to raze individual homes to replace them with other private property that would bring higher tax revenues to the city. Notice that, except for the museum, none of the items mentioned above are actually “public property”. This is important to understand Greenberg’s stupidity later on:

In the Texas Legislature, Rep. Frank Corte has proposed a state constitutional amendment barring the use of eminent domain “if a primary purpose of the taking is for economic development.”

His proposal says nothing about the transfer of condemned property to new private ownership. It just says that economic development can’t be “a primary purpose” for the use of eminent domain, even if the government itself will own and operate the acquired land for public use — for example, for a public road to provide access to a manufacturing plant.

If Corte’s idea prevails, unwilling property owners and their lawyers will claim economic development is “a primary purpose” for nearly any eminent-domain proceeding — and they’ll be right.

The main purpose of streets, highways, mass-transit facilities, power plants and electrical transmission lines is to enable economic activity to occur. Drainage projects restore economic value to flood-prone areas. Schools prepare young people for jobs. Parks enhance property values. Arts centers revive neighborhoods.

Even sewage treatment plants are economic development projects. You don’t believe me? Close down the sewer system and see what happens to the city’s economy.

It would be suicidal to restrict government options as Corte proposes.

Again, notice the sudden, ridiculously stupid leap of logic: roads and parks are the same as privately-owned luxury hotels. Except I can’t have a picnic in the hotel hallway, or drive through the lobby.

And parks and roads don’t reside on commercially-zoned, high-tax land.

Regarding transfers of condemned land to new private owners, Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a cogent, principled dissent that the court should revisit earlier precedents allowing such transfers.

I admire Thomas’ intellectual clarity in arguing that the Fifth Amendment’s public-use clause allows the government to take property “only if it actually uses or gives the public a legal right to use the property.”

But that genie can’t be put back in the bottle. Too much has changed in legal, business and government practices over the past two centuries.

Nor should we ever have eliminated slavery or Jim Crowe laws, integrated schools or given blacks or women the right to vote — after all, these were all established by decades or even centuries of court precedent, and the genie’s out of the bottle because “too much has changed” to allow us to protect private ownership of land.

The Supreme Court punted and returned final decision to the local governments, and by doing so they have completely failed in their primary purpose: to defend individual liberties against the tyranny of the government.

Mr. Greenberg is either (a) incapable of having a logical argument, or (b) willfully lying to support an agenda.

Isn’t it convenient that our rights are eroded, one by one, while people clap and cheer? Stalin called them useful idiots, but idiots can only be so dangerous.