Eminent Domain Abuse

For twenty or more years cities and counties have been taking property under the guise of eminent domain and handing the property over to policitally favored private interests. After all, politicians will always serve their patrons. (Patrons are not the same as constituents. Constituents can only give them a vote. Patrons pay!)

Libertarians have been fuming about this all along but making no headway. When we told people about it, they thought we were nuts. It was so obviously unconstitutional, that it couldn't possibly be true. It took losing a case in the Supreme Court to get the attention of the public.

So now everyone knows what the government has been doing in this sphere and there is pressure on state legislatures to fix this. Thus the politicians need to find a way to make it appear that they have fixed the problem but leave enough loopholes to continue to serve their patrons.

Look at what happened in my state of Kansas. We started the session with 8 different versions of proposals to end eminent domain abuse. The strongest was an amendment to the state constitution that would have forbidden private transfer unconditionally. This failed to get the required 2/3 vote by only 3 votes in the house. It would have been a shoe in with the Senate and the voters. (HCR5025)

Instead we got a law, that lets the restriction on private transfer be overridden by a simple majority of the legislature and is not effective for more than a year. Thus the patrons have a full year to steal your property and after that they can still get your property, they just have to induce enough legislators to go along.

Property rights are much too important to be left to the random wishes of a transitory majority. They need to be absolute. Otherwise, there is no true ownership of property. You only rent your property. Anyone with enough money to offer the local government more in real estate tax than you are paying and can influence enough votes in the legislature can outbid you for what you thought was your property.

Remember that our founders set this nation up as a constitutional republic, not a democracy. That is because temporary majorities can be assembled, in an unfettered democracy, to violate the rights of any minority. A little greed or a little fear can work wonders.

We need the hard and fast limits on government power that a constitution provides to protect the minority. Remember please that you will be the minority some day in some debate and you will want your rights protected.