Legal Plunder

...No doubt there is truth lurking here somewhere...

...You gotta start somewhere...

...As Steven Greenhut, an editorial writer for the Orange County Register, observes in his timely new book, Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain, "governments increasingly use eminent domain to take property from one private owner in Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a member of the California and Washington, D.C...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW order to give it to another private owner...

...Greenhut dissects how journalists routinely fail to question even the most obvious eminent domain abuses...

...Happily, homeowners organized effectively and forced the city to back down...

...Only if officials forget to invoke an alleged public interest could it be stopped...

...The U.S...

...1/4 Legal Plunder Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain by Steven Greenhut (Seven Locks Press, 311 pages, $17.95) Reviewed by Doug Bandow FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES the Michigan Supreme Court's decision in Poletown Neighborhood Council v. Detroit allowed governments in that state to take most any property they wanted to transfer to most anyone they wanted for most any reason they wanted...

...So, while history was "an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools," non-combatants in the Civil War were written off as abunch of dead Quakers...

...For a book of tales, it starts things off on a high note, and a symbolic one—the counterculture's wonder boy coming face to face with a man who was an icon of the Old America...

...All this parsing will make the book an engrossing read for those who aren't yet tired of the game...

...Equally outrageous was the attempt by Cypress, another southern California city, to seize Cottonwood Christian Center in order to transfer the property to Costco...

...Instead, more often than not eminent domain is now used as a form of corporate welfare, intended to enrich billionaire retailers like Costco and millionaire real estate moguls like Donald Trump...

...They bragged about their ability to use eminent domain for whatever reason they chose, and they made it clear that the government's desires should take precedence over the desires of 'a narrow special interest,' which is how city officials repeatedly referred to the church...

...You look too light for a heavyweight kid, you'll have to put on a few pounds," the old champion tells him, and signs off with, "Don't be afraid of hitting somebody too hard...

...But Greenhut also found good news: though property owners often lose, increasingly they are fighting back and winning...

...Chronicles gives pieces of the story of Dylan's life—but the important word is story...

...This main meal of garbage had to be mixed up with some butter and mushrooms and I'd have to go to great lengths to do it...

...Greenhut's worthy call to arms concludes with a practical primer on how individuals, families, churches, and communities can fight back...

...Although the case has no formal legal force outside of Michigan, it reflects a slow renaissance of judicial respect for property rights...

...A small home owner or businessman then "must surrender his home or business because a wealthy developer—perhaps a big campaign contributor and mover and shaker in the community, or an out-of-town corporation promising an expanded tax base for the city—has bigger and better plans for it...

...HATEVER THE MERITS of this personal struggle, Dylan's fealty to his music is the great redeeming truth of his life...

...The 4,500-member interdenominational congregation fought back, aided by the Becket Fund, which specializes in defending religious liberty...

...It's a charming story, though, and it does no harm to tell...

...The result would be rank injustice even if the property were taken for a real public purpose...

...he must have loved Luis Tiant...

...Indeed, all legal eyes now fall on the U.S...

...Although the courts have been more willing to enforce the provision requiring payment of compensation, they too often have allowed governments to take advantage of property owners...

...Dylan helped finish off that country, and then lived long enough to rue its passing...

...Not always, of course—sometimes eminent domain is used for traditional purposes, as road-building...

...I wasn't the toastmaster of any generation, and that notion needed to be pulled up by its roots...

...A nihilist was "a Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoy...

...Supreme Court, which is considering a case involving the city of New London, Connecticut...

...Churches don't deliver much in the way of property or sales taxes, a black mark in the view of city councilmen dedicated to the old principle of tax, spend, and elect...

...Bierce poked at everything about society that seemed false to him, from organized religion to hypocritical social norms, but he also skewered the dissenters...

...Reviewers have responded positively to the book's vitality, of which there is plenty...

...The new case, Wayne County vs...

...But wasn't there a more believable way of saying so...

...Today they often do so with the aid of the Washington-based Institute for Justice, which has made protection of property rights one of its most important objectives...

...Adverse publicity helped derail an abusive taking by Atlantic City...

...Put beside those achievements, his life does not seem nearly so interesting, or so necessary to understand...

...The Connecticut Supreme Court, relying upon the reasoning of Poletown, upheld the plan by the New London Development Corporation to take scores of modest riverfront homes and businesses to build luxury houses, expensive office space, and a hotel...

...The only error worse than letting Dylan fool you is assuming he must be putting you on merely because he is writing poorly...

...For instance, the city fathers of Garden Grove, a working class community south of Los Angeles, decided to turn a tidy neighborhood of 400 into a theme park...

...That goal often supplements the desire to benefit local elites, usually with the connivance of the usual civic boosters, including the media...

...Moving expenses, business goodwill, advantageous locations, as well as real values often are lost or minimized when figuring compensation...

...The abuses are legion...

...Most important is an aroused citizenry prepared to defend their rights...

...Collected under various titles and put out in a few editions, his so-called Devil's Dictionary is the standard for judging the definitional darts of these specialized lexicons...

...No normal person would have thought that but, writes Greenhut, "Blight, as advocates of redevelopment and eminent domain often point out, is a legal term rather than a descriptive term...

...Other favored beneficiaries are owners of hotels, race tracks, and sports franchises...

...There's a sadness to that, too...

...FAMINENT DOMAIN WAS LONG THOUGHT to be justi- fied for a genuine "public use," that is, something used by the public...

...Liberwocky is not nearly so catholic a work as the Dictionary...

...So rank have been the outrages that in July the Michigan Supreme Court expressly overruled its Poletown decision "in order to vindicate our constitution, protect the people's property rights and preserve the legitimacy of the judicial branch as the expositor, not creator, of fundamental law...

...Constitution's "public use" restriction was satisfied, the court ruled, even when Detroit seized an entire ethnic neighborhood to hand over to General Motors for a new factory...

...Garden Grove removed the neighborhood from its "redevelopment" area, while proceeding with similar efforts elsewhere...

...It's a good question, and Steven Greenhut's answer is that someone else gets to live there when local officials decide to engage in social engineering for fun and profit...

...It's "legal plunder," Greenhut writes, just like 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2004 the historical experience of mercantilism, which featured "a powerful central state that worked in concert with established, private interests...

...But there are passages that make clear he is a songwriter, not an essayist: What kind of alchemy, I wondered, could create a perfume that would make reaction to a person lukewarm, indifferent, and apathetic...

...But you would think after 40 years of cat and mouse, they would be less easily swayed by Dylan's claims that all he ever really wanted was to settle down with his family, have a white picket fence (he actually uses the phrase), and putter around the house...

...Dylan's version might be, "Better to enslave myself in my own system than in yours...

...But increasingly government deploys eminent domain in an attempt to create "high-valued," meaning taxable, development...

...He once wrote a song about Catfish Hunter...

...I wanted to get some...

...Author Victor Gold is a grand old man of the right...

...bars...

...There's abundant bad news...

...Few musicians can claim to have served American music so well, to have inhabited, stretched, and disseminated so many of its traditions...

...They helped preserve America through many difficult trials in peace and war...

...Explains Greenhut: "There was no developer in mind, just an idea in the head of the city's top planners and bureaucrats...

...Hathcock, barred use of eminent domain to construct an industrial and office park...

...To its credit, the church rejected an offer by Cypress to trade for the property next door—which the city would seize from its owner through eminent domain...

...Wayne County will help shift legal currents in the other direction...

...But even an elderly Dempsey, a man who really had traveled on freight trains and worked odd jobs, wouldn't have mistaken Dylan for anything other than a welterweight bohemian...

...They were brazen in their goals...

...Ordinary heroes" helped create this nation more than 200 years ago...

...In Cypress, writes Greenhut, "City officials did NOVEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 BOOKS IN REVIEW not dress up what they were doing in legalistic language...

...Eventually, Cypress, which lost a preliminary court ruling, agreed to a voluntary land swap which yielded the church more room for its new worship center...

...Alas, this case was no anomaly...

...Surely he wouldn't let this masterpiece of self-parody and mixed metaphor slip by unless he meant to...

...Public officials typically favor the wealthy and influential because they are wealthy and influential...

...He worked for Barry Goldwater and Spiro Agnew, co-wrote a book with George H.W...

...With the help of the Institute of Justice, Coking won: the term "blight" could be most accurately applied to Trump's enterprise, which has veered towards bankruptcy...

...If Dylan himself is shrouded in mystery, his musical canon seems increasingly of a piece, invariably connected with the music of American popular or folk traditions, even if he often bent them beyond recognition and made them seem almost his own personal property...

...How come someone else can live here, and we can't," asks Susette Kelo, one of the dispossessed landowners...

...Officials attempted to deny the obvious, while treating the neighborhood as blighted...

...It's pretty safe to say, for example, that Dylan is telling tales when he opens the book by describing a meeting with Jack Dempsey one evening in 1961 at the former champion's restaurant...

...But sometimes property owners—"ordinary heroes," Greenhut calls them—fight back and beat city hall...

...Bush, and Jeremy Lott is the foreign press critic for GetReligion.org...

...They were going to do what they had been doing on a smaller scale across the city: play land developer by condemning property, then trying to market the acquired tracts to some big out-of-town development company...

...THE HEART OF GREENHUT'S BOOK is a series of examples of government's routine misuse of power...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW knows, William Blake once wrote, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's...

...That's why the framers of the Constitution included a limited power to take property in the Fifth Amendment...

...Yet the reader senses that there is no game here, just a patch of bad prose...

...Gold's Fools Liberwocky: What Liberals Say and What They Really Mean by Victor Gold (WND Books, 210 pages, $15.99) Reviewed by Jeremy Lott MOCK REFERENCE BOOKS go back a ways but the first really great practitioner of the art was newspaperman Ambrose Bierce...

...Its focus is tight and, in the definitions and the short essays, you can observe the anger seeping through the wit...

...Looking at Bierce's Dictionary now, the tasty parts of the stew boil to the surface: its bile and wit, its misogyny, its digressions (poetry or snippets of dialogue follow many entries), its practiced cynicism...

...Dylan's writing is often rhythmic and musical, as one would expect, and his wit redeems his forays into self-pity and grandiosity...

...Michigan may no longer seize private property for "economic development," that is, to hand to new private owners who might pay more in taxes...

...Vera Coking, a widow, was unfortunate enough to live across from Donald Trump's casino...

...The Poletown decision was oft-cited by other courts as they ruled that public officials could take land at their pleasure...

...They can help restore life to constitutional provisions that were meant to protect all of us from government misuse of its power of eminent domain...

...As an autobiographer, he is a good junkball pitcher, all flutters and dips and arcs, and somewhere in that mess is 56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2004 the ball...

...Yet today the public use requirement has almost disappeared, as officials, with judicial approval, regularly take property from Peter to give to Paul...

...He asked the local redevelopment agency to take her property for a limousine parking lot for high rollers...

...They ridiculed church members at public meetings...