politicophile

Thank you for the invitation, Pen. I've been rather busy lately and haven't had time to spend on TFP.

It strikes me that Kelo is a natural development of people who (as Thomas accuses) fail to properly distinguish between "public use" and "public purpose". That distinction mirrors the split in thinking between socialists and New Dealers (along with those further to the right). We all agree it is permissible for the government to deprive citizens of property through taxation when the money is being used to build public schools, highways, armies, etc. because those items are very obviously intended for public use.

Contrast that type of government policy with one where citizens are deprived of their property through taxation and that money is then used to provide welfare benefits to the unemployed. If the goal of such a program was to conduct an LBJ-esque "War on Poverty", we would clearly be viewing an instance of private property being taken for a "public purpose", but not strictly for "public use".

The five most liberal Justices seem to have favored the public purpose standard, while the four Justices furthest to the right favored the public use standard. My explanation for the difference in philosophies stems back to the radical change in the left's views of entitlements and public purposes that accompanied Johnson's Great Society effort.

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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty