Friday, June 24, 2005

Update: Screwing the Poor, Court Style

Of all people, Neal Boortz - who I usually hate - wrote a good rant on the Kelo v. New London case. He points out something that I didn't think of - will this have an effect on our booming real-estate market? So much of our real-estate boom is based on people buying houses as investments. If your hold on the property is tenuous at best, that might drive down prices and screw a lot of investors. (On the plus side, it'll make housing more affordable for low-income Americans.) Either way, I wonder if this case will be, as an unintended consequence, the needle that pops the housing bubble...

Read the Boortz rant here. He does prove himself to be the partisan flack that he is towards the end when he starts insulting liberalism (even though liberals, for the most part, are on his side here). But it's fun otherwise.

4 comments:

Jeff said...

Later on the page, Boortz' intern also goes off on how much bullshit the flag-burning amendment is. That's also a good argument, and worth reading. These two issues will probably be the only things I agree with Boortz on all year, so take note.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, to get to the good argument about flag burning, I had to scroll past Boortz's vulgar and nauseating rant against Dick Durbin's comments comparing Camp X-Ray to Soviet gulags.

No question that Durbin's quotes would qualify for an invocation of Godwin's Law, but it seems more and more common that anything a liberal says that's exaggerated or hyperbolic is immediately dismissed in its entirety because of any discrepancy. And while in theory, this might be an admirable way to prevent such things, it only works if everybody gets ignored for exaggeration rather that just one side. Maybe it's personal bias, but I haven't seen widely reported objection to exaggerated statements by conservative leaders, other than the most extreme cases like the claims of WMDs and whatnot.

Just an observation.

- pierce

Ben said...

Interesting.....here's a guy from the liberal blog DailyKos who argues the case was rightly decided: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/25/201045/439


I've not read the post in its entirety.....I've got better ways to spend my Saturday night....but thought I would send it to you.

Ben said...

Well, I've read the post now. I don't buy it. The majority's opinion still places no limit on the government's Takings power...aside, I suppose, from having funds to compensate their victims.

The dissent makes a lot more sense. There have been Takings cases in the past that allowed Taking property and giving it to private people, but those have involved some affirmative harm in the pre-Takings use. In this case, there was no affirmative harm....the private property owners were just in the government's way.