Nobody's Property Is Safe
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For the past 29 years of classes I have tried to advise all my students to become homeowners as soon as possible in their careers. I based that on the protection owning a home should give individuals, and families particularly, from both civil and personal power, and from the vicissitudes of changing economics, inflation, etc. But with the deplorable Kelo v. City of New London decision of the U.S. Supreme Court such of the protective character of home ownership has been stripped away. Homes, both dwelling places and the land on which they stand, are now open to seizure by municipalities and states at simply the desire of those authorities to put such properties to other use, even that which is primarily private, a major departure from the public use demanded by the U.S: Constitution (Fifth Amendment) for exercise of appropriation under "eminent domain."
Some time ago the city of New London, Conn., cast its eye upon what is described as a "faded" neighborhood of apartments and longtime homes, one of them lived in for six decades by the Derys. Wilhelmina Dery was born there 87 years ago. The city wanted more taxes, and lined up a number of private developers willing to change the character of the area with a Pfizer pharmaceutical research facility, a proposed Coast Guard museum, and shops and restaurants for workers and visitors. The main "public use" would seem to be a bridge across the Thomas River for strollers and sightseers.
Despite the Constitution's demand that property be safe from appropriation except for public use, the liberal majority of the high court decided that simple economic benefit could pose as "public use' to make the seizure legal. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who more often votes with those making up the one-Justice majority in this case — Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Souter, and Stevens — correctly objected that the result of the ruling is to "wash out any distinction between private and public use of property." More telling than even that was Justice O'Connor's observation:
"The government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The founders [of the nation] cannot have intended this perverse result."
That liberalism has little respect for either the principle of subsidiarity or rights based on the natural law (property ownership being one such) has always been known by its critics. The New York Times, whose Left-leaning is as noticeable as the off-plumb. posture of the Tower of Pisa, gave its immediate (next-morning) imprimatur to the decision, calling it "a welcome vindication of cities' ability to act in the public interest," adding it was also "a setback to the `property rights' movement, which is trying to block government from imposing reasonable zoning and environmental regulations." Of course, those later powers were not involved here. Homes have always been premier use for the highest zoning authority, and it is doubtful if home-use is less environmentally friendly than medicine research, public eateries, or museums. The truth is any blocking of governmental purpose, even in the cause of private home ownership, is seen as a setback to liberal ambitions for monopolistic government. The Times' stance in that regard is made clear by the title it gave its pro-seizure editorial: "The Limits of Property Rights."
The fact is Kelo v. City of New London means in effect that property rights exist only at the pleasure of government. Denver's Rocky Mountain News, free of the Times' disparaging view of "the few people [who] refused to sell," got it precisely right when it wrote: "What's left of the Constitution's protection of private property rights? Not much after the U.S. Supreme Court rul[ing] ... Nobody even tried to claim the New London houses were doing any harm to anybody. They were just in the way of the city's desire for a different use of the land that would `increase tax and other revenues,' as the development plan put it."
The ominous truth is that this decision is a step in establishing what the Institute for Policy Studies gurus have called "Economic Democracy." This is to be reached by comprehensive economic reform. Nice, clean, attractive neighborhoods reflect such utopian "reform," even when made possible by bringing force against individual human rights. What will result from the New London plan will be a little example of what Zbigniew Brezezinski (Crisis, April, 1996) called "coercive utopia." Liberal reformers can't abide the untidy eccentricity that private ownership allows, for it contradicts the need of cultural experts in the field of utopian progressivism.
Indirectly, the New London case ruling puts families at risk, for it leaves them at the mercy of communal planners. One of the major weapons of Marxism against its dissenters was the absolute power of dictatorial government over their property. The families of dissenters could be deprived of shelter by a government that claimed total monopoly over property. Farmers who fed their families from crops and livestock by fruitful use of land could be starved by depriving them of free choice of how to utilize it.
Is that the purpose or even likely outcome of the case in question? Of course not. But once a principle is established it is always present, lurking in the shadowy regions of possibility, to be summoned up when the cultural condition deems it useful. The Rocky Mountain News editorial seems to recognize that in its concluding passage:
"But once officials get dollar signs in their eyes, it's an uphill battle to regain rights the Supreme Court should never have taken away."
To that, the Terri Schiavos and the aborted babies of recent times would surely say, if only they could speak, "Amen." Once basic human rights are viewed as granted by the state (even when represented by its high justices) then they are in danger of being lost at the desire and decision of the state. And that is what was at stake in the New London case. When it came within the purview of a majority of liberal courts of law whose judges believe the state omnipotent and subject to no law beyond its own, the outcome was inevitable.
Perhaps some who have not appreciated what momentous power for either good or evil the nation's courts wield will be awakened to reality by this decision. It arrogantly takes from all the refuge private property once afforded against intrusion by civil power in the hands of the greedy or the ambitious who find the idea of inherent human rights a barrier to their appetites. The struggle over appointments to the federal courts is precisely the battlefield between the idea of rights given citizens by God and that of all rights being subject to governmental largesse. It is essential for the future of this nation as the land of the free that the former idea prevail through courts in which it is respected and applied. This will take the appointment to appeal courts, and most importantly that called Supreme, of candidates who do not think the Constitution should be in effect rewritten by subjective opinion of judges, but be interpreted with respect for its substantive meanings.
Surely the Fifth Amendment's reference to confiscation of property for public use did not mean to allow such seizure by bringing into existence a body such as the New London Development Corp., a private and unelected entity. If so, then as the Rocky Mountain News puts it, "Nobody's property is safe." But further, the very ethos and reality of America as a haven from oppression is in danger of evaporating under the harsh reality of profit and power-driven compulsion — brought against "obstructionists" such as those "few who refused to sell" in the New London neighborhood.
The New York Times found a few inches of space to give to some of their reactions. Susette Kelo, the nurse whose name identified the resisters' suit. asked, "Do they have any idea what they've done?" Well, they're forcing her to vacate the cottage she enjoyed as her home the past eight years, a property bought by putting a hard-earned salary to a use she thought she was entitled to rely on for the rest of her life. Diana Berliner, Institute for Justice lawyer representing some of the homeowners, put it succinctly: "The [Supreme] court has just told homeowners that the government can take their house for someone who pays more inn taxes." Well, isn't that what it comes down to, after all?
Another owner, of three houses with 12 apartments, also was "on the money" with his comment to the Times: "It's desperately hard to believe that in this country you can lose your home to private developers. It's basically corporate theft." The Institute for Justice said owners had been offered in the low $100,000's for their properties, based on a five-year-old appraisal. The city has been collecting rent on the appropriated properties for the past four years.
In Wheat Ridge, Colo., the owner of a muffler and repair shop told the Rocky Mountain News that the notion cities offer "fair market value" for condemned proper is laughable. Chuck Mandrill was offered 275,000 for his shop that would have cost him $1.2 million to replace. Fortunately, the city backed off the proposed confiscation.
Obviously, only judges with a sense of social justice offer protection for injustices such as a different set of jurists has just brought about in New London. And ascendancy of judges respectful of ownership rights depends ultimately on voters. That should be in the mind of property owners the next time they vote. After all, the voters still have the power to put in office only legislative and executive candidates respectful of basic human rights, among which is ownership. But the way things are going, it would be dangerous to think even the right of voting is safe from progressivists who feel any amount of individualism is too "rugged" for these culturally sophisticated times. So vote as if every election might be the last. Who, after all, knows! Until very recently we also thought our homes were safely ours. Voters should cast their ballots as if their very lives and fortunes were at stake, as the Kelso case decision suggests may very well be the case, at least regarding fortunes. As for life, the liberals have been whittling away at that right for several decades now, and only a concerned electorate can stop them.
© The Wanderer
This item 6532 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
