What Kelo Hath Wraught: SCOTUS rejects Highlands Act appeal and "just compensation"

... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
— The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

The concepts date all the way back to the Magna Carta and are supposed to protect us from abuses of government power. Yet we've already seen through the looking glass how the term "public use" can be whatever Humpty Dumpty chooses it to mean. After the Supreme Court decided against liberty in Kelo v. City of New London no one's property is truly safe from the whims of the government.

But we'll still get "just compensation", right?

Sadly, no.

Last week SCOTUS refused to hear a challenge to New Jersey's Highlands Act. Thus left standing are lower court rulings supporting a law which gives the state of New Jersey the ability to seize private land, designate it as "crucial watershed" thereby rescinding all development rights, and refuse to compensate the owners even one thin dime.

Billions upon billions of dollars in real estate value was wiped out at the stroke of a pen. The Highlands Act forbids development (you can't even erect a dog house!) within a land mass equal to one third of our state's total area.

And now our government, like the English kinds of olde, need not trifle itself with paying for that land. Oh in theory, and I'm sure this is the fig leaf which SCOTUS is hiding behind, there is the state Farmland Preservation Fund. It's broke of course, just like everything else in New Jersey government. The odds of being simultaneously hit by a meteor and winning the lottery are higher than the chance a landowner will ever see a dime from that fund.

But, since the law stipulates that someday, somewhere, somehow, someone might be paid for their land, that's apparently good enough to satisfy the Constitutional requirement for "just compensation".

Our Founding Fathers had a word for that kind of law.

Tyranny.

Posted at 12:48 by Chris Wysocki   [/rants]   Comments | Perm Link |
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