“Government should be in the business of protecting private property,” she told me in an interview, sounding every bit a member of the free-market group the Club for Growth. “Private property is precious in America.”
These words came, surprisingly, from the mouth of Congresswoman Maxine Waters, one of the most far-left members of the Democratic caucus, in an interview with Rich Lowry from National Review. Rep. Waters was referring, of course, to the Supreme Court’s soon-to-be-infamous decision in Kelo v. City of New London which said that governments can use their eminent domain powers to take property from one person and give it to another.
The reaction to the Kelo decision has been interesting in that it has put near socialists such as Waters on the same side as Antonin Scalia and the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. All of them seem to recognize the danger inherent in the Court’s ruling in June. Taken to its logical extreme, Kelo effectively means an end to private property in any meaningful sense since it empowers the government to take property any time it finds that someone else can put it to a more “beneficial use.”
As Walter Williams pointed out in the article I linked to yesterday, property rights are an essential part of human rights. If our property can be taken away by the state at any time for any reason it deems fit, then our personal freedoms can be just as easily curtailed.
Hat Tip to The Volokh Conspiracy.
