Frightful summary
Matthew Greene sums up the recent Connecticut Supreme Court decision:
What if the government could condemn your house and the rest of the houses in your neighborhood, and then give them to a development company to put a hotel and some office space in their place because your town had fallen on hard economic times?
Well according to the Supreme Court of Connecticut, that’s a perfectly acceptable use of the government’s eminent-domain powers.
He’s thankful that the Supreme Court will hear the case. I’m not so certain the Supreme Court will do the right thing.
February 14th, 2005 at 11:04 am
That’s not just the limit of it, either. There was a case, in Missouri, I think — where a city condemned a Toyota dealership and handed the land over to a BMW dealership, because they figured the BMW dealership would bring in more tax revenue.
Tax revenue = public use, or so they claim.
Kelo, for my money, is the most important Supreme Court case in the last five years. Maybe ten.
February 14th, 2005 at 11:11 am
Do you hear that?
That’s the sound of Jefferson and Hamilton spinning in their graves.
This decision is the most wrongheaded I’ve ever seen (short of Dred Scott). It flies in the face of our understanding of our liberties. It sends absolutely the wrong message about government accountability. It is the biggest step towards socialism we have made since the New Deal.