Ray,
Your response displays a remarkable ignorance about the law and about markets, truly remarkable.
1) The amount of money involved (incidentally, I just made up this hypo, it's not based on anything) is and should be irrelevant. A guy who holds up somebody at gunpoint is stealing whether he nets $50 or $5000. A person's property rights should be protected by law whether he paid $58,000 for his single-wide in Drain or $5.8 million for a house overlooking Malibu. Your communistic tendencies are showing: there's only North Korea and Cuba left for you now, though.
2) A guy who owns property and has it taken by the "county" is not the same as the guy who buys a bond and sees it go down in value in the marketplace. The guy, X, is taking all the investment risk in the property, just not the government theft risk. If the bondholder had his bond confiscated by the county, then you've got a parallel. Tell me you're at least bright enough to comprehend this small but basic issue.
3) It doesn't matter how the "county" determines that it wishes to take X's land for the public good, whether it is for fresh air or more seagulls or whatever. And no one is arguing that the reason might not be valid, or that the county can't legally take it. But they have to pay for it. If the government can simply march in and take property by dint of "regulation," that is not only unconstitutional, but it is theft. Trust me on this, my Administrative Law professor was quite good on this subject and I got a A in his class. He really was quite good, and he now sits on the Supreme Court, a liberal justice named Stephen Breyer.
And here is the problem: the county wants the property, it thinks society would be better off if it could stop the development of it but it doesn't want to compensate X for it. It wants to steal it. Simple as that. It knows that the citizenry would never support a $15 million bond issue to buy the 100 acres, but also knows that if it dresses up the issue as "regulation" rather than theft, it might be able to get away with it. There's just one little problem here, as Stephen Breyer knows as well as anyone--it's in absolute violation of the Constitution. Not questionable penumbras giving rise to mysterious rights of abortion, not even questionable interpretations of what exactly the right to bear arms, militias, etc. actually meant, and not what was or is now meant by cruel and unusual punishment. It's absolutely clear: the government can't steal your property without compensating you. That's your CD player, your favorite sweater, your rocking chair or your house in the mountains.
All the disinformation and misinformation calling people "speculators" (oooooh, that's so informative!) who are "gaming" (what dat?) the county, is irrelevant. I stated facts, you'd like to take the guy's property from him for the county's other residents and blame it on investment risk. That's not a very deep analysis, Ray. I really thought you might either gain some knowledge here (yes, it was a long shot) or at least give it better than a junior varsity try.
Kb |
