Property rights vs. racism
Timothy P. Carney
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When government increases its power to act as it wishes, the powerful and well-connected win, and the powerless lose.
In contrast, when property rights are strong and the rule of law is consistently applied, the less powerful are protected from the predations of the powerful.
VIOLENCE AGAINST TEACHERS CANNOT BE TOLERATED
That’s the lesson from the history of land theft black families told in today’s New York Times.
Local and state governments regularly used eminent domain or other intimidation methods to take valuable land from black families, the story explains.
Los Angeles County stole oceanfront property from the Bruce family in the 1920s, and finally returned it recently.
The Jones family says that a parking lot at the University of Alabama is land that the state took from them. As the New York Times reports, “their father turned down an offer to purchase his 10-acre plot, and in 1954, the city condemned the property in order to gain access to a water source, forcing the family to move.”
This is not a rare occurrence.
“Scholars say the use of eminent domain was often racially motivated and invoked disproportionately in minority and poor communities. One study showed that between 1949 and 1973, 2,532 eminent domain projects in 992 cities displaced one million people — two-thirds of them African American.”
Some of the land government stole through state violence. One lawyer working on helping these families says he regularly hears stories like this: “We had 100 acres of farmland in Texas, and the sheriff came with dogs and guns and said, ‘If we didn’t leave town, there would be trouble.’ So we lost everything.”
The lesson here is about the importance of property rights and curbing government authority. If the owner of property has very strong rights to it, that makes it harder for a government that dislikes that owner to steal it from him or her. If government has expansive power to act in “the public interest,” it will trample on the rights of the powerless.
It’s not a lesson the New York Times has always appreciated. Their editorial board has consistently championed the use of eminent domain to take land from poor people and give it to the well-off and powerful. They described the government-corporate taking of working-class homes in New London, Connecticut, as a plan to “assemble property for a private development project that promised to prop up the city’s tax base and bring in badly needed jobs.”
(That private development did nothing of the sort, by the way.)
In 2009 the New York Times editorial board objected when an appellate court curbed the power of the government to take “blighted” land in Harlem and give it to Columbia University.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Other liberal outlets have lamented that property rights could be used to curb government’s power to give land to the folks whom the government believes would best use the land.
The history of eminent domain against black families ought to send a message, though, to those who want to empower governments and weaken property rights: such power tends to get abused, to the disadvantage of the vulnerable.