the blog quebecois

As you may know, many people consider this the "go-to" blog for analysis of US Supreme Court decisions. As you may also know, many of these people are idiots, in that I rarely, if ever, do any analysis of US Supreme Court decisions. But they still come flocking back for my considered opinion. Idiots.

Bless 'em.

I do keep half an eye on what the SC is up to, though, because it's been my experience that each and every bad idea that comes out of the States shows up here ten years later, repackaged as some brilliant new Canadian initiative, just as the Americans are on the verge of ditching it.

So I was aware of the furor over Kelo v. City of New London, but mostly in the thought that this was a Bad Thing. I was aided in this perception by columnists such as Debra Saunders:

The city of New London, Conn., found itself in economic doldrums. Redevelopment was supposed to be the bromide. State and local officials created the New London Development Corp. That unelected entity decided to increase tax revenues by pushing middle-class families out of their waterfront homes and using eminent domain -- the other E.D. -- to make way for a revitalization project, anchored around a Pfizer Inc. research facility.

and George Will:

The question answered yesterday was: Can government profit by seizing the property of people of modest means and giving it to wealthy people who can pay more taxes than can be extracted from the original owners? The court answered yes.

Not to mention this from Horace Cooper, a professor at George Mason:

Reminding one more of the Queen of Heart's court in Alice in Wonderland rather than the highest court in our land, the Supreme Court ended its 2004-2005 term critically crippling the property rights of red state America while dramatically augmenting the rights of blue state America.

However, John Hinderaker of the Power Line blog argues that the decision is not a radical departure from the precedents covering eminent domain/takings law. Hinderaker (I believe) is himself a lawyer and presumably conversant with the issues. In the Weekly Standard a week ago he wrote:

MANY CRITICS of the Kelo decision have said that it authorizes seizing the property of one person merely to give it to another. Apart from any misunderstanding of Pfizer's role, this can only be because, once the NLDC acquires title to the Fort Trumble property, it will be conveyed to a developer, Boston's Corcoran Jennison, to carry out the project. Some hostility to the Kelo decision seems to be based on the belief that Corcoran Jennison may profit from its work--an odd concern, one might have thought, to be expressed by conservatives. But New London's use of a private developer highlights an important point: there is no doubt that the city (or the NLDC) could use its eminent domain power in support of the Fort Trumble project if it planned to retain ownership of the land and administer the project itself. If the project were publicly owned, no one could question that the associated condemnation proceedings would be in support of a "public use." But are the rights of Americans any less imperiled by condemnation in support of publicly-owned projects? And, as a matter of policy, if a city wants, for example, to create more housing, does it make any sense to force it to pursue the long-discredited practice of building public housing projects, rather than facilitating the use of private capital and private management to achieve the same end?

So, in conclusion: Kelo -- Good or Bad? Dunno. I suspect it has possibilities for abuses, but I'm not inclined to get as apoplectic about it as Prof. Cooper. Government and business working together is often a recipe for kickbacks and other corruption; but then, so too is government and public-service unions. Or for that matter, government by itself (see Ottawa, Canada).

This is what the Crusading Press supposedly lives to uncover, when it isn't just printing press releases from its favorite pet causes.

Hinderaker is the only person (that I've read) to point out that it's unfair to demonize Pfizer for this, when it was the city of New London who initiated the expropriation, in the hope that private business would seek to set up in that location.

I imagine it sucks equally to have your property seized for a privately-developed industrial park as it does to have it commandeered for an airport or highway interchange. It's one of those necessary evils, I guess -- it's difficult to imagine any kind of coherent society without the government having that power. About all you can hope for is that it will offer fair compensation for value.

In short, I suspect the grand Republic to the south will sputter along more-or-less successfully; what it means for Canada in the year 2015 is anyone's guess.

I'm going to be quite busy for the next five or six days -- I might make the occasional post, but I probably won't have much to say until next week.