Taxes: All the Good the Public Needs -- Some Property Owners Are More Equal than Others

Human Events Online ^ | June 29, 2005 | Mac Johnson

[hinterlander]

The great irony of America is that it has achieved so much public good by letting people simply tend to their private business.

By contrast, the most disastrous social experiments of our age –Marxism and its less ambitious offspring-- have ruined so many private lives by holding the “public good” so high that no one life seemed to matter. But the public good is, in the end, nothing more than the sum of several million seemingly insignificant private lives. You cannot dispose of these individuals and their individual rights and somehow increase the public good.

That is why last week’s Supreme Court decision in the case of Kelo v. New London, regarding government’s now unfettered power of “eminent domain” is so disturbing –and, frankly, so un-American. “Eminent domain,” of course, is the power of government to seize the private property of citizens against their will. This power has always existed in this country, being rooted in Common Law far older than America itself, and it is sometimes a necessary measure that must be taken to protect the public good.

[hermgem]

Should States decide upon public domain, visualize this:
Who's the majority, those with or those without property?
The majority wins, and we enter the period of tyranny by a majority mob.
A Republic based on a Constitution has just been declared dysfunctional by a Constitution altering 5:4 Supreme Court decision.
Voters, on guard, when filling Supreme and other court vacancies.

[eggman]

The line from the end of the article says it all.

We need Justices that understand that the public good is best served by preserving the rights of private citizens.

[steve-b]

The dreadful Kelo case did not have to be decided this way; the left-leaning Justice Anthony Kennedy (perhaps best known for his belief that he can use foreign law to decide US cases) sits on the court today because Democrats in the Senate defeated the conservative nominee Robert Bork in 1987.

What makes him think that Bork would have ruled any differently? The man can't read the plain words of the Second Amendment; what magic would improve his reading comprehension when he got to the Fifth?