Who Needs a Constitution, Part II?
George Will’s column is great reading if you care about the liberties that state and federal governments are destroying. Mr. Will’s argument is so logical, it’s likely that liberals won’t understand or appreciate it:
Rampant redistribution of wealth by government is now the norm. So is this: It inflames government’s natural rapaciousness and subverts the rule of law. This degeneration of governance is illustrated by the Illinois Legislature’s transfer of income from some disfavored riverboat casinos to racetracks.
Illinois has nine licensed riverboat casinos and five horse-racing tracks. In 2006, supposedly to “address the negative impact that riverboat gaming has had” on Illinois horse racing, the Legislature, racing interests made huge contributions to Gov. Rod Blagojevich, mandated a transfer of 3 percent of the gross receipts of the four most profitable casinos, those in the Chicago area, to the state’s horse-racing tracks. This levy, subsequently extended to run until 2011, will confiscate substantially more than $100 million.
What is to prevent legislators from taking revenues from Wal-Mart and giving them to local retailers? Or from chain drugstores to local pharmacies? Not the tattered remnant of the Constitution’s takings clause.
The notion that private property still has meaning is quaint but it isn’t reality. Kelo v. New London took care of that. Thanks to that ruling, the threshold that people have to meet is minimal at best. Here’s how Mr. Will illustrates that:
In a brief opposing the Illinois Legislature, the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of state legislators, makes this argument against “predatory taxation”: Suppose Congress, eager to aid newspapers hurt by competition from new information technologies, decides to take a percentage of the assets of Bill Gates and half a dozen other beneficiaries of those technologies, and give the money to newspapers. Would not this “take and transfer” scheme be unconstitutional? Targeting specific, identifiable persons or entities for unfavorable treatment, and transferring their assets to equally identifiable persons or entities, surely also raises equal protection issues.
I even recall an instance where Oakland took the commercial property that a business was planning on developing and gave the land to another commercial developer whose plan they liked more. That’s the type of thing an out-of-control government does. That’s what people who don’t care about the Constitution do.
That isn’t what the Constitution’s Takings Clause was intended to mean, however. That isn’t the type of thing that happened when when the cliche “A man’s home is his castle” meant something. Following Kelo, that cliche now essentially means “A man’s home is his castle except if the government gets a better offer for the use of that land.”
It’s time that SCOTUS revisited Kelo and got it right this time. America can’t afford to have our constitutional protections eroded any further.
Technorati Tags: Kelo, Constitution, Takings Clause, Fourth Amendment, SCOTUS, Private Property
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
April 14th, 2009 at 7:40 am
Predatory taxation is a good phrase. The battle against liberal extortion and racketeering via the tax code needs to be joined.
See you at the Tea Party!