Wrecking the Wreckers

A bill that would limit local governments' ability to take private land for other people's private gain is being floated in Colorado, reports the Denver Post. The Colorado Municipal League, an interest group for local governments in the state, is opposed, pointing to many wonderful Albertsons and Kmarts the state might be lacking if not for their power to condemn and take private land willy-nilly. Sam Staley wrote a feature article for Reason on this ugly practice back in our February 2003 issue.

[Link via Rational Review]

Comments

[Sarpy Sam]

The municipalities will still just claim that they are doing it for the public good. They will just rewrite what amounts to public good and take over peoples land for whatever they want.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Then we'll have to start killing them.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Oh, jeez, was that on the air?

[Jean Bart]

Do you mean "wreckers" in the Communist propaganda sense of the term?

[Douglas Fletcher]

I think they mean wrecker as in a big crane with a large iron ball at the end of chain.

[Sarpy Sam]

I think they mean wreckers in the way of anybody out to take personal property through coercive means.

[Will Spencer]

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. -- Frederic Bastiat

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. -- Frederic Bastiat

Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. -- John Adams

When a government takes over a people's economic life it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs. -- Maxwell Anderson

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others. -- Ayn Rand

I'm in Colorado, so it appears I should be getting involved with this one.