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The retirement of a Supreme Court justice is always big news in the USA. Coming on the heels of a ruling which made big business developers grasping municipalities across the United States rub their hands together with glee, it is vital that the mindset which produced one of the most monstrous anti-liberty trends in America today not be reinforced with yet another ultra-statist. To her credit, although Sandra Day O’Connor was neither a darling of the right nor consistently supporting of civil liberties, she did dissent quite strongly from the monstrous Kelo verdict.
Perhaps now that more people are seeing past the simplistic left/right divide on the issue of eminent domain abuse, the importance of insisting on a judge who does revolt at the very idea of such a predator’s charter should become the main focus not just for George W. Bush but people of any party who think that being secure in your property is one of the very lynchpins of a free society.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
– 5th Amendment: US Constitution
Today is the 4th of July, when Americans celebrate their independence and much talk of freedom and constitutions occurs. This day is in many ways an orgy of self-congratulation, much of which is entirely justified (I make no secret of my pro-Americanism Atlanticism).
But perhaps, just perhaps, the ‘shot heard around the country’ that was delivered by the Supreme Court of the United States with the Kelo verdict will snap a great number of Americans out of their understandable but entirely misplaced complacency regarding the benevolence of their own nation-state.
Not only does Eminent Domain now pose a threat to anyone whose property happens to catch the eye of a well connected property developer, the USA also has outrageous ‘asset forfeiture’ laws that allow suspects to have their property taken by the state, reversing the burden of proof and making the accused (but un-convicted and usually un-tried) person prove their property is not the proceeds of some crime in order to have the property returned (they cannot prevent it from being taken in the first place). So much for ‘due process’.
Americans would do well to remember that it was the use of British sedition laws to seize private property from political activists was a major cause of disaffection in the colonies in the lead up to the Revolution in 1776. Moreover those sedition laws were far less capricious and more respectful of due process than modern ‘asset forfeiture’ laws (colonial era sedition laws at least required you to actually be convicted).
The fight against Al Qaeda and any who ally with them must go on but the greatest threat to liberty (and in the long run that inevitably means life) facing the people in the United States comes not from without but from within. Until the entire scope of what government can do is radically cut back, Kelo is pointing the way to a grim future. I hope that the Supreme Court’s destruction of the 5th Amendment by allowing the state to take private property for the private use of property developers, will be reversed long before it requires the active use of the 2nd Amendment to make private property secure against those who would rather use political power rather than markets to enrich themselves.
Happy birthday America.
Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter and current Wall Street Journal columnist, often serves in my mind of an example of how even East Coast conservatives share a mindset that is parochial, elitist, insular, and irredeemably statist. However, in today’s column she steps back from the Bos-Wash bubble to marvel at the bloviating egomaniacs that populate Washington.
What’s wrong with them? That’s what I’m thinking more and more as I watch the news from Washington.
Welcome to the club, Peggy. Too bad it took you so many decades to join up.
How exactly does it work? How does legitimate self-confidence become wildly inflated self-regard? How does self respect become unblinking conceit? How exactly does one’s character become destabilized in Washington?
And, bless her, she even takes on the fair-haired boy of the elites, Barack Obama. Barack is widely heralded because he is young, a Democrat, reasonably articulate, and, of course, because he is black. He has also revealed himself to be a first-rate egomaniac. Although in the Senate he doesn’t even make the A team for self-importance, what with such colossi as Roberty Byrd and John McCain to contend with, he is certainly putting himself forward as a bloviator to be reckoned with.
This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time magazine and explaining that he’s a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better. “In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat–in all this he reminded me not just of my own struggles.”
Because this kind of inflated self-regard is part of the molecular make-up of politicians, there is no such thing as “good” government, instituted through any kind of ethical or institutional means. There is only “limited” government.
There is a serious plan being master minded by pro-liberty activists to use powers of ’eminent domain’ in New Hampshire to take a house belonging to Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and build a hotel on the site.
The proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel” will feature the “Just Desserts Café” and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon’s Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans.
“This is not a prank” said Clements, “The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development.”
The way the systems works is that you need to make sure at least five of the Selectmen have a nice fat stake in the project personally (and why bother to hide it? That is how this process works). Justification? Easy: it will draw pro-liberty activists and tourists into Weare and thereby increase tax revenues to the town.
This is one of the most splendid ideas I have heard in a while as I have long liked the idea of using the impositions of the state against the very people responsible for imposing them on others. When it comes to such things, there is no ‘public and private sphere’, there is just a private sphere.
It seems just a tad perverse that whilst uttering rhetoric about supporting freedom and democracy, the US is sending its military to help train Communists in Vietnam.
Why, exactly?
It is just plain wrong to think things were just peachy in the United States until last week when all the Supreme Court did was make de jure what had been de facto for quite some time regarding the state’s ability to sieze private property for no other reason than to get more tax. But perhaps this is for the best as there is no longer any doubt that things are badly broken and that this should not be a left vs. right issue. As Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent:
If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect discrete and insular minorities, surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects. The deferential standard this court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms to victimize the weak.
Those incentives have made the legacy of this court’s public purpose test an unhappy one. In the 1950s, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of public use this court adopted in Berman, cities rushed to draw plans for downtown development. Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were non-white, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them. Public works projects in the 1950s and 1960s destroyed predominantly minority communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baltimore, Maryland. In 1981, urban planners in Detroit, Michigan, uprooted the largely lower-income and elderly Poletown neighborhood for the benefit of the General Motors Corporation. Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks; in cities across the country, urban renewal came to be known as Negro removal. Over 97 percent of the individuals forcibly removed from their homes by the slum-clearance project upheld by this court in Berman were black. Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the court’s decision will be to exacerbate these effects.
I trust that decent Democrats who are not in the pockets of public sector employee associations and who actually have at the core of their convictions the desire to help the ‘have nots’ against whom the system can at time be so slanted, will set aside partisan politics and join with Republicans who are not in the pockets of well funded business interests to rebel against this savage wound to the US Constitution which in effects rips out the Fifth Amendment. Let this case be the litmus test of decency against which political figures of both left and right will judged and judged harshly.
There is an industry in the USA in which people make a career based on using the power of the state to seize the private property from churches, home owners and small businesses and turn it over to large corporations in order to let them benefit by setting up large businesses and thereby provide more tax money for more public sector employees to share in.
It has been pointed out by many that this is a deeply corrupting process in which wealthy developers simply pay local government officials to use force in their narrow economic interests. Yet ‘corrupting’ seems a rather weak term for what is simply naked theft which at the same time negates the often stated pretence that the state is there to ensure individual rights are not trampled upon by the rich and powerful. In fact the Supreme Court ruling overtly institutionalises the fact that the police and courts are vehicles for the rich and powerful (business and governmental interests) to do whatever they wish if there is money to be made.
To understand how this could happen it helps if you realise that many Democrats these days take what is technically a fascist view of private property (that you are free to own property provided you further state objectives with it) rather than a socialist one (that all means of production should belong to the state). So next time a some hysterical Democrat from the Daily Kos tells you how important it is to prevent George Bush from adding some conservatives to the Supreme Court because of the need to safeguard civil liberties from The Wingnuts, understand that these same people actually have no problem from a civil liberties point of view with enriching already wealthy property developers at the expense of community churches and poor people. Exactly how this squares with their purported support for ‘the little guy’ (have you ever heard of a wealthy district full of stockbrokers and lawyers being bulldozed to make way for a Wal-Mart?) is an interesting question answered only via some impressive pretzel logic. In reality the Justices who stood up to corporate interests were ‘conservatives’. The fight to prevent eminent domain abuse now has to be conducted at State level now that the Federal battle has been lost to the corporatists.
But also many advocates of the Second Amendment talk about how private firearms are the ultimate bulwark against tyranny and injustice. Well maybe now it is time for them to walk the walk. Maybe if some of the people who make their living as ’eminent domain professionals’ were unable to scout out their targets in the most egregious of these cases without considerable personal risk, much like any criminal casing a property they intend to rob, then perhaps the true nature of what they are doing becomes harder to hide behind legal verbiage.
The only upside to this whole situation is the likely radicalising effect this ruling will have on people to whom civil liberties matter and to whom private property is the very corner stone of those liberties.
“I think that maybe – just maybe – anti-Wal Mart sentiment has more to do with an aversion to the white, rural ethnology the store sometimes represents than its labor practices. We can’t have our Ethiopian restaurants and esoteric bookstores blighted by NASCAR culture.”
– The always good American blogger Radley Balko, telling it like it is.
Failed Presidential candidate and negligible Senator John Kerry claims to have released all of his military records to the public. It is unlikely that this claim is entirely truthful.
Lets be clear: he did not release anything to the public. He released some records to his homies and long-time supporters at the Boston Globe, who have written an article glossing over the gaps in what they got from him, but have not made the records available to the public in any way, shape or form.
It seems pretty clear that the Globe did not get the full records, for reasons summed up in this rather pithy post. There is good reason, in short, to believe that the full record described prior to the election, was not released even to the Globe.
It is always dicey to reach a conclusion in the absence of full information, but when the people involved refused to release that information, well, they invite speculation. I think the reason it took Kerry so long to “release” his “records”, as he promised on national television some months ago, and the reason they were not released to the public as promised, is because he was playing games with (a) who he requested records from and (b) what records he actually released.
But let’s not allow our annoyance at the perfectly ordinary dissembling from this perfectly unexceptional man to cloud our glee at the release of both that picture and the fact that George W. Bush, reviled across the Democratic Party as a moron, got better grades than Kerry did.
The tabloid Dallas Observer bangs another one out of the park with its ongoing coverage of the corruption and incompetence of the Dallas police force. What’s fascinating in this rendition of the age-old story of extortion and protection rackets is the way this one operates out in the open, in the light of day.
Dallas has quite a crime problem in some of its neighborhoods – enormous amounts of violent crime orbiting the black market drug trade. Because people in the drug trade don’t give a crap about laws making it illegal, such laws are understandably less than efficacious in getting rid of the black market and its ills. Thus, with impeccable legislative logic, since criminals aren’t deterred by the law, our betters decided that laws imposing penalties on law-abiding people, such as the owners of property where the criminals live or hang-out, might have some effect. The so-called “nuisance law” was born, and one of the more astonishing tales of unintended consequences of the law began. → Continue reading: Public nuisance
It is astonishing that a potential law could even reach the stage of being voted on in the USA that says if you witness or ‘become aware’ that neighbours or friends have broken the law with narcotics (which presumes you are a competent judge of that), you will be compelled by law to denounce them to the police. Failure to do so means prosecution and the threat of a two year sentence yourself if convicted of simply minding your own business. Even if you disagree with the drug laws, you will be threatened with prison if you do not actively help enforce them against other people.
I have met Congressman Sensenbrenner and I am shocked that he could have come up with such a profoundly authoritarian and illiberal law like this. He explained his support for the ghastly Patriot Act was purely a temporary emergency measure, pointing to the sunset clause as proof of that. Well if this* is his idea of reasonable legislation then I fear that I see all his motivations in a dramatically different light.
Turning neighbour against neighbour like this was how communist states maintained power in the Eastern bloc and anyone putting their name to such a law should be seen for the enemy of civil society that they are, turning people who just wish to be left alone into coerced informers for the state. Truly disgraceful.
*= to see details, enter HR1528 in the search box, then check the enter bill number button, then press search
The US Supreme Court today overturned the obstruction of justice conviction of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. This comes too late, of course, to save Andersen, which was largely destroyed by the conviction, but it nonetheless injects some common sense back into the rules around withholding information from the government (it can be legal, you know, a fact which the SCOTUS felt the feds needed to be reminded of) and document disposal (a topic on which I spend far too much of my time).
In a unanimous opinion, justices said the former Big Five accounting firm’s June 2002 obstruction-of-justice conviction – which virtually destroyed Andersen – was improper. The decision said jury instructions at trial were too vague and broad for jurors to determine correctly whether Andersen obstructed justice.
. . .
[I]n his opinion, Rehnquist noted that it is not necessarily wrong for companies to instruct employees to destroy documents, even if the intent is in part to keep information from the government.
Like a mother who advises a son to invoke his right against compelled self-incrimination out of fear he might be convicted, “persuading” an employee to withhold information is not “inherently malign,” Rehnquist wrote.
“The instructions also diluted the meaning of ‘corruptly’ so that it covered innocent conduct,” Rehnquist said.
The Andersen case was of a piece, really, with Martha Stewart’s conviction. Both were convicted, essentially, of failing to cooperate in their own prosecution. Give Martha cred for serving her time, but I wonder if she wouldn’t have won out on appeal. Eventually.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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