TOS Blog: Daily Commentary from an Objectivist Perspective

Sunday, March 4, 2012

In Fight for Property Rights, Institute for Justice Tops “Pyramid of Moral Endurance”

Posted by Ari Armstrong at 3:23 pm

The Supreme Court slapped the faces of property owners in its 2005 Kelo v. New London decision. As the Institute for Justice (IJ) reviews:

Susette Kelo dreamed of owning a home that looked out over the water. She purchased and lovingly restored her little pink house [in a neighborhood of New London, Connecticut]. . . .

In 1998 . . . the City determined that someone else could make better use of the land than the . . . residents. The City handed over its power of eminent domain . . . to the New London Development Corporation (NLDC), a private body, to take the entire neighborhood for private development. . . .

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision against Kelo and her neighbors sparked a nation-wide backlash against eminent domain abuse, leading eight state supreme courts and 43 state legislatures to strengthen protections for property rights.

Thankfully, on Tuesday the U.S. House passed bill 1433, the Private Property Rights Protection Act, IJ reported in an email alert.

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Journal for People of ReasonIn introducing the bill, Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner said, “This legislation will prevent economic development from being used as a justification for exercising its power of eminent domain.”

One’s home is one’s castle. The U.S. government should stop rather than encourage theft of private property under color of law.

Kudos to the Institute for Justice for its relentless fight for property rights. IJ exemplifies the ideal that Ayn Rand described in her essay “The Establishing of an Establishment”:

In Atlas Shrugged, I discussed the “pyramid of ability” in the realm of economics. The genius who fights “every form of tyranny over the mind of man” is fighting a battle for which lesser men do not have the strength, but on which their freedom, their dignity, and their integrity depend. It is the pyramid of moral endurance.

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Image: Institute for Justice

Posted in: Individual Rights and Law

Comments are welcome so long as they are civil.
  • Anonymous

    Great!  It passed the House.  Now, if it passes the Senate, gets signed into law (an actual law) and is duly and expeditiously enforced if anybody tries any shenanegans, then that’s real, true, full progress in the right direction.  But, emminent domain needs much more limiting.  “Public” use is much more limited than people think it is.  It’s limited to essential use by government in performing its proper function.  That excludes lots of things besides economic redevelopment, for which this power is still used.

    I’m also glad to see the term, “color of law”, used here instead of “law”.  To me, that appears to mean what it should mean: not law, rather, criminal plan by criminal document put into the position of law, mimicking the authority of law by the appropriated physical power meant for government.  At the very least, “color of law” indicates something different, in an important way, from actual law.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Frank-Farber/100001243224754 Frank Farber

    It is good. I continue without a house or home. I am not getting one penny from the sale of the house I have and own up to five years before before the present month. It good the nation of professionals looking to right wrongs notes me and gets my house agian or greater and ones of various additional people.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Frank-Farber/100001243224754 Frank Farber

    Thus, I like to read there are people with professions to return my property including house or greater or more to me and additional people not deserving not to have their various properties separate from them. More than reading, it is good there is the successful completion of the action of getting these things and more what is right with them.

  • Anonymous

    Why do we need a new law to protect us from our protectors? Because our “protectors” are by far the biggest violators of our rights. Why? Could it be that giving away our power to a group that has no limits, i.e., decides what its limits are, is a failed experiment? It is time to go back to square one. We need to come up with real “checks and balances” or self govern. I am for the latter.