New York Values Are Infecting Campaign 2016
So a Manhattan real estate mogul meets a Brooklyn socialist, a well-heeled carpetbagger and a former NYC mayor in a bar….
On a day when the political media will be salivating over the drama of Donald Trump vs. Megyn Kelly vs. Sean Hannity vs. Bill O'Reilly (or whatever the latest 6th Avenue dynamic is), I have an op-ed in the L.A. Times making the argument that well, maybe ol' Ted Cruz was right after all: There are too many New York values in this race. Excerpt:
Take eminent domain. Since the Supreme Court's Kelo vs. City of New London decision, governments have had constitutional cover not only to seize private property for public use — to build a school or freeway, for instance — but also to transfer land from one private owner to another for the "public good," a vague term that sometimes means replacing tenements with sports stadiums or luggage stores with luxury hotels.
The Republican Party has long opposed such transfers as contrary to free market principles; so do 4 out of 5 Americans. But in cheek-by-jowl Manhattan, the property rights of small homeowners and business people are like bugs on the windshield of the city's swashbuckling real estate developers and the ribbon-cutting politicians who enable them.
Bloomberg as mayor relied on eminent domain so much that he campaigned against the post-Kelo legislative backlash, warning that "You would never build any big thing any place in any big city in this country if you didn't have the power of eminent domain." Trump has said he supports Kelo "100%."
There's more on guns, surveillance, fracking, minimum wage, and so on. Read the whole thing here.