Knights of the Kelo Republic
And so progressivism reaches its ironic endgame. As Thomas Jefferson so eloquently put: “Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have.â€
Instead of buying from the owners of the property, the buyers now buy influence from local politicians. I’m betting they get a discount compared to before the ruling. This political market will benefit the politically well-connected.
Meanwhile, Kieran Healy finds that a spectre is haunting the Supreme Court.
Among Kelo, Raich, the President’s assertion of his ability to strip the citizenship from any American and declare that person an enemy combatant, the institution of torture as an official if lightly denied policy, all of it stretching back to Wickard v. Filburn, we have completed our revolution-within-the-form. We are now, in principle, a totalitarian country, merely one where Authority is required to undertake certain showy gyrations for the entertainment of the crowd while pursuing its glorious visions. Perhaps we and they will continue to find the gyrations so entertaining that we’ll keep them in place. Even fascism must express itself through a local cultural matrix.
Comment by mnrr —
June 24, 2005 @ 8:29 am
Oh, come on, Jim. Are you serious? This day in 2005 the country became a fascist tyranny? Please. First of all, Kelo, however bad, recognizes the federal standard as a baseline, and states are free to make up their own, as Arizona has. Whether that continues to be the case and states don’t simply defer to the federal standard, is another question.
There are plenty of other black days in Supreme Court jurisprudence.
And finally, I thought the day this became a tyranny was the day we got the Social Security Card:
To quote Garet Garett:
“There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.”
That dude wrote that in 1938. Plus, he was a “managerial liberal,” at one point!
Comment by Hesiod —
June 24, 2005 @ 8:33 am
I love how it’s all the Government’s fault. Let’s be honest here. No Government would ever use the power under Kelo without some greedy big developers pushing for it.
Comment by Patrick Nielsen Hayden —
June 24, 2005 @ 8:51 am
Uh, Hesiod, that’s a little like saying “no government would ever commit genocide without some angry bigots pushing for it.” Well duh. Also, and?
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Also, Jim didn’t say “it’s all the Government’s fault.”
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I don’t have to be a libertarian to recognize that what Jim is talking about is the operations of Authority, of which government is only one arm.
Comment by Nell —
June 24, 2005 @ 8:55 am
Not full-blown fascist tyranny, but it certainly is one more big step to official corporate rule. I honestly expected Kelo to be decided differently, so had taken it off my long list of ‘developments that inspire bleak thoughts’.
Comment by Leonard —
June 24, 2005 @ 9:08 am
Take heart, Jim. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. We’re not even halfway down.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 24, 2005 @ 9:16 am
mnrr: Is there something about the meaning of the English word “completed” which is obscure?
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And for the record, I would never gainsay Garet Garrett on anything.
Comment by matthew hogan —
June 24, 2005 @ 9:36 am
Jim –
“We are now, in principle, a totalitarian country, …”
Meso, I mean mellow out, dude!
(You’ll have to disown that quote when the non- (correction, I mean neo-)libertarians have in the name of Administration security eminent-domained Reason, CATO, the blogosphere, and the rest for public use.)
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
June 24, 2005 @ 9:59 am
Does “the President’s assertion of his ability to strip the citizenship from any American and declare that person an enemy combatant, the institution of torture as an official if lightly denied policy” really stretch back to Wickard vs Filburn?
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I would say that Raich is a direct result of Wickard vs Filburn, Kelo really isn’t but can be rhetorically claimed as part of it if you wish. But calling the President’s citizenship-stripping policy part of it is taking something that is pretty clearly new with this Administration and putting responsibility for it back on some supposed iron processes of historical development, instead of on the people who actually made the decision. And the institution of torture as official if lightly denied American policy has a long and distinguished history from slave control measures, through the Marines in the Philippines, racial lynchings in the South, our actions in Central America, and finally Iraq. So it hardly started with Wickard. I think that the libertarian urge to blame everything on the New Deal is carrying you away.
Comment by Greg Morrow —
June 24, 2005 @ 10:09 am
Y’know, if the decision is really that bad, the Fifth Amendment isn’t holy writ; its last clause can be modified. Tell your representative and senators to submit an amendment.
Comment by Avram —
June 24, 2005 @ 10:18 am
There are still state constitutions.
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Though what happens the day that a developer wants to grab a chunk of land, gets told that he can’t because the state’s constitution has a tighter eminent domain restriction than the US constitution does, and then bribes his congressmen to make the grab as a federal matter, well, I dunno.
Comment by jlw —
June 24, 2005 @ 11:45 am
Power is as power does–always has, always will.
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What’s different is that the post-War (um, the Big One) explosion of prosperity brought about by managerial liberalism and the New Deal has fooled a lot of people into believing that their tiny property holdings and small stakes to corporate profits entitled them to the same deferrence as those with real fortunes. Every man’s home is his castle, and all that.
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But no. San Simeon is a fucking castle. The Dakota–a castle. Some anonymous tract house made from nailed together plywood and two-by-fours? That’s a shanty with a mortgage, and just as liable to be bulldozed away as the shanties of any favela in Rio.
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Those of us who make incomes in the middle 60 percent flatter ourselves to believe that our power and importance falls somewhere halfway between that of Bill Gates and that of Jimmy the Squeegee Man. In truth, Jimmy and I and anyone reading this blog own nothing that Bill Gates couldn’t claim (and have his claim enforced) if he wanted it badly enough.
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Those who rail against the New Deal might have a small point: Had it never succeeded so well, it might not have engendered so many false beliefs in our own worth in the eyes of Authority.
Comment by Gary Farber —
June 25, 2005 @ 7:54 am
FWIW, I’m a “liberal” who finds both Kelo and Raich dubious and plausibly and likely wrongly decided. This doesn’t seem all unpopular a reaction to either decision by pleny of “liberals,” and not simply because of outcome, either, it seems to me.
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August 26, 2005 @ 2:50 pm
[...] . I only hope we will realize what is happening before even more damage is done. Update: Jim Henley says much the same. It must be something in the Maryland water: Among Kel [...]