Look out! The libertarians are coming!


High Country News is worried about initiatives against eminent domain and believes it may be part of a bigger program to (gasp!) reduce the size of government.
Yes, this is yellow journalism. But there are some choice quotes. Emphasis added.

I began to see the pattern in April, during a conversation with John Echeverria, head of the Environmental Law and Policy Institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Echeverria called it "eminent domain hysteria."

"The Kelo case is presented as a caricature in the news," Echeverria said. "Most people don’t understand the valuable development (that eminent domain) can help generate, and how, if it’s fairly conducted, it can produce entirely fair, even highly favorable outcomes, for affected property owners — they’re paid market value or well above." We talked about some of the horror stories, where governments use eminent domain in questionable ways. But those are few and far between. What’s really going on, Echeverria said, is that, "The property-rights advocates have exploited Kelo to advance a broader anti-government agenda."

I hope you got that. The expert that the paper chose has equated development with eminent domain, all in the name of producing more tax income.

And of course, owners would be "fairly compensated."

Most of this article worries that those "anemic" libertarians would get the issues on the ballot where the people can decide.

Here is another one of those choice quotes from a little later in the article. Emphasis added.

The most poignant stories come from people who voted for Measure 37, and now see negative impacts on their own neighborhoods and property values. "I voted for the measure because I believe in property rights," Rose Straher, who lives in tiny Brookings on the southern Oregon coast, told me. The owner of a nearby 10-acre lily farm filed a Measure 37 claim to turn it into a 40-space mobile-home park, and got the Curry County government to waive its regulations. Straher and 46 other neighbors signed a petition opposing it. Measure 37 "has absolutely no protection for the neighborhood," Straher told me. "You’re giving superior rights to one particular owner. That is a big flaw."

Like individual owners choosing to change their own property? Big flaw there.

What amazes me is that certain people don't want other people deciding what to do with their own property. It's the old collective French model versus the American individualist one again.

Do you believe that you need permission to be an individual?

Oh, and about those complaints on out-of-state funds? Libertarians didn't invent that trick. Same thing happened with medical marijuana a decade or so back. The Arizona ballot initiative was funded by California liberal millionaires.

Hat tip to Hammer of Truth.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sat - July 29, 2006 at 05:43 AM  Tag


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