Ever since the Supreme Court endorsed radically expanded use of eminent domain, in 2005’s Kelo v. New London, we have witnessed pitched battles between governments eager to trample property rights and citizens fighting to protect those rights.
Among recent efforts is a Missouri initiative to reform the eminent domain process, led by Ron Calzone with Missourians for Property Rights.
Alas, it’s all too easy to ignore the suffering of human beings whose property rights are violated by “legal” means when you neither see these human beings nor hear their stories. This is why critics of flipping property from the hands of rightful owners to the claws of rapacious opportunists with political pull must be grateful to the producers of Begging for Billionaires: The Attack on Property Rights in America.
The film exposes how city governments “brazenly seize property after property from the powerless” to turn over to well-connected players “for the pettiest of non-essential ‘economic development’ projects,” many subsidized by taxpayers. Neighborhoods flattened, lives uprooted.
Among other stories, we learn that of James Roos, property owner of an area called “blighted” who created a controversial mural to oppose eminent domain abuse.
Friends of liberty and property can defeat the enemies of these rights. Begging for Billionaires dramatizes why we must do so.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Shilling For Billionaires”
The members of the
Court who voted for that prostitutuion of our Constitutuion should all be impeached. The Constitutuion is clear in what it says. To me, it seems one of the problems is the idiots who have the black dresses are reading it in the context of today’s PC definitions. They should be required to interpret that document in accordance with word meanings current at the time it was written, rather than the hippy-doper language current today.
Don’t forget to mention how often this eminent domain is exercised for the express purpose of building a shopping mall, such as the Triangle Square project in Costa Mesa, CA…where prior store owners were promised space preference in the new structure, and were subsequently screwed, blued and tattoo’d (promise not kept)
It was not the Supreme Court that expanded eminent domain. It was the local governments.
Taking of property by eminent domain existed before the 5th amendment. All that the amendment did was make sure we got paid. The only limitation in the constitution is compensation, not public purpose.
We cannot defend the constitution by distorting it when we don’t like what a government is doing.