Friday, December 14, 2007

Update on the Kelo case

Conservatives were (rightly) enraged back in 2005 when the city of New London, CT was allowed by the Supreme Court to use eminent domain to transfer property from the rightful owners to private businesses. Well, courtesy of Volokh and SayAnythingblog, here are the results.

More or less, not a spadeful of earth has been moved on most of the land that was taken from the rightful owners, and it illustrates a very good lesson; when a business asks government for a tax break or for eminent domain to be used in their favor, it most likely means that they don't have a business plan that will work without this help.

Instead of taxing existing residents and merchants, and cheating people out of the fair value of their property, I'd suggest we'd do well to tell these beggars to take a hike. Show them a picture of the devastation in New London or Poletown if they ask why.

4 comments:

Gino said...

i've read somewhere, some time ago, that the reasons for delay are the result of finding a financier due to the bad publicity this project has generated.
apparently, the money men dont want to be sullied.

Shawn said...

thankfully, I do know that BB&T won't finance any project that's been stolen by eminent domain.

The conversation with the head of BB&T on Econtalk was quite good...worth a listen.

Bike Bubba said...

BB & T? Help me out here, bro.

Shawn said...

oh yeah, sorry...

bb&t is a southern bank...forgot about that.

I'd link you to the econtalk page about it, but can't get to it from here at work...title is:

"allison on strategy, profits, and self-interest"

you can get there from the archives page...check it out. ...made me interested in reading Atlas Shrugged. :)