Kelo and Counting

It may be an encouraging sign that so many people have become worked up over the U.S. Supreme Court’s Kelo decision upholding the power of state governments to take, via eminent domain, privately owned land for the benefit of other private parties. This practice has been going on for years without too much notice. But underlying the reaction to this decision may be a growing awareness that all governmental action – from taxation to regulation to eminent domain to wars – involves the taking of private property for the benefit of non-owners. The taking of private property for governmental use is no less an act of lawful plunder. The state is wholly incompatible with a system of privately-owned property, a truth whose implications may come to be more broadly understood in the fallout from this case.

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