Perceptive, funny comments putting Kelo in perspective, by The Mogambo Guru at The Daily Reckoning:
I am surprised at the hostile reaction to the Supreme Court ruling in Kelo v. New London. The crux of the case is, using their analogy, that the state can take property from A to give it to B because B will pay higher taxes. The people don’t like that? Hahahaha! I shake my head in wonder! This is the exact same loathsome Leftist lunatic philosophy that has permeated everything for the last half century! But now, NOW, they are upset? The government is continually taking something away from you, whom I will refer to as A, to give it to some other guy, whom I will label as B. But now, just because it is their houses on the line, people are getting upset? Hahahaha! What morons!
11:49 am on July 7, 2005But you never hear WHY New London is making this grab for people’s property. The reason is, obviously that the morons of New London, like moronic governments everywhere, have persisted in electing Leftist morons to their government, and that government of morons (GOM) has spent the last half century spending every dime they can get their hands on, and raising taxes to get MORE money to spend, and promising the moon to everybody. Now they need money. They need lots of money. Lots and lots of money. But taxes are already so onerous that they can’t raise them any more.
And why do they need so much money? They have provided for legions of city workers who are, like all government workers everywhere, grossly overpaid and under-worked, and who have benefit packages so outrageously generous that they are not even available anywhere in the private sector, and they are under-funded. They have promised lifetime pensions to everybody that ever sat on the City Council, or worked for the government, or even merely walked by City Hall one day when they were handing out generous pensions to everybody in sight. They have continuously built parks and playgrounds and recreational facilities and gymnasiums and nature trails and museums and swimming pools and erected a multitude of public buildings, and staffed all of them to the max. They have responded to the egregiously bad performance of their educational system by paying the bad teachers and administrators more and more and more, instead of firing them. They have created local entitlement programs and welfare programs and before-school breakfast programs and after-school latch-key programs and school-crossing guard programs and assistance programs of every stripe. They have whole fleets of new cars and trucks for city employees. They have issued general obligation bonds and revenue-anticipation bonds by the truck full. And now they have, like the butthead citizens who elected these dimwits, spent their way to the literal edge of bankruptcy.
And so the people are upset? Hahahaha! The state has debased and destroyed their money, but they are not upset about that. The state has grown itself to be, literally, half the entire economy, but they are not upset about that. The state has now installed so many taxes on so many things that they have driven up prices, but they are not upset about that. The state has indebted every citizen alive, and citizens who are not even born yet, so heavily that the debt cannot ever be paid back, but they are not upset about that. The state has encouraged that all the retirement accounts of everyone be put into the stock and bond markets, and they have lost money for years, but they are not upset about that. The state has gradually eaten away at every liberty, piece by piece by piece, but they are not upset about that. They have allowed the Constitution to be gutted, bit by bit by bit, but they are not upset about that. But maybe force them to move out of their houses, and they are, all of a sudden, upset about that! Hahahaha!
Perhaps Vox Day, in an essay on WorldNetDaily.com, encapsulated it best when he wrote, “Merely substitute a few terms in describing the system and it becomes clear that the Supreme Court has established a neofeudal oligarchy, where all land is held in the name of the federal government-king, governed by his local government-nobles and worked by taxpayer-serfs. Should one serf fail to produce a satisfactory harvest of crops-tax revenues, the noble can take the land from one serf and give it to another who promises to produce a more abundant harvest.
“This is a major expansion of the eminent domain concept, and I can confidently predict that the redefinition of the constitutional term ‘public use’ will soon be as stretched beyond recognition as the now-meaningless phrase ‘interstate commerce,’ (as has) the Orwellian term that now covers things that do not cross state lines (and thus are not interstate) and have not been sold or exchanged for other goods (and thus are not commerce).”
