Kelo: The Whoops That Wasn't?
June 23 is a mixed day in recent American history: Twenty years ago, my little sister was born, which has thus far had little effect on the health of our constitutional democracy, and ten years ago, the Supreme Court handed down its decision for the government in Kelo v. City of New London, which had a decidedly negative effect on said constitutional health. The famed Richard Epstein recounts it for NR today: Ten years ago, on June 23, 2005, the United States Supreme Court dropped a judicial thunderbolt in Kelo v. City of New London. By a narrow five-to-four margin it rejected a spirited challenge that Susette Kelo and her neighboring landowners had raised against the ambitious land-use development plan put forward by the City of New London, Ct. The formulaic account of the holding is that a local government does not violate the "public use" component of the Constitution's takings clause — "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation" — when it condemns property that will be turned over to a private developer for private development. Under the logic of Justice John Paul Stevens, so long as there is an indirect promised public benefit from the development process, the public-use inquiry is at an end, and Ms. Kelo can be driven out of her pink house by the water. Ten years later, my reaction is the same as it was at the time: truly horrible. The good news is that, appalling as the decision is, its significance has been lessened by political action at the state level, and it's actually, as Epstein recounts, prompted a healthy reexamination of how strong government's power to grab land should be even when it's being used for, say, a highway rather than a hypothetical drug plant. Funny, that: It's almost like the interpretation of our rights before government isn't solely up to nine men and women in robes. But Kelo's not quite a dead letter, as Epstein explains, and it just points to bigger potential violations of property rights: Some state courts, and some state legislatures, have tried to clip the wings of the decision, but even that has been a hard battle. It is difficult to get anyone to attack general planning for economic development, because sometimes in blighted communities it actually works. But "blight" can easily become a term of art, so that weeds in the garden may trigger a government takeover. All this is not to deny that Kelo has had its effect, for surely it has, but chiefly through the medium of public opinion, which has tended to make it politically more costly for governments to condemn the property of their own citizens. It is so much easier politically to get local governments to rally support to zone out people they don't want in their communities. Kelo was a big deal, and it will remain in the consciousness of the American public for years to come. Zoning is a bigger deal, and the same misguided progressive impulses that led to the rise of central planning on steroids are still dominant in an area that needs its own Kelo-like fiasco to get the public attention that it so richly deserves. Relatedly, Donald Trump is a notoriously big fan of this nonsense, as our own Dan Foster explained back in 2011: [Donald] Trump has more than once teamed up with municipalities in an attempt to gut property rights, most egregiously to push an elderly widow off the Atlantic City property she'd owned for 30 years, and which Trump wanted to turn into a limousine parking lot. It should be no surprise, then, that Trump told Neil Cavuto that he agrees with Kelo "100 percent." Yes, this guy is supposedly running for the nomination of the party of individual rights. Weird: Conservative Wonk Is Running the CBO Conservatively and Wonkishly In a flash of fair-mindedness, Matt Yglesias of Vox writes that Keith Hall, whom Republicans appointed to run the Congressional Budget Office when they took control of both houses last year, is . . . "off to a great start": [Hall's] CBO appointment was bound up with a push by the GOP for more "dynamic scoring" of tax policy. The big dynamic element that Hall's CBO introduced into [his first big] analysis is the idea that the US economy will have fewer total hours worked with Obamacare than it would have without it. . . . The upshot of this, according to the CBO, is that repealing the Affordable Care Act will not increase the federal budget deficit as much as previous estimates implied. At the same time, it still does increase the federal budget deficit. Under Hall's leadership, the CBO has done exactly what many of us feared it couldn't do — produce a score that is both dynamic and credible. Rather than being reverse-engineered to say what congressional Republicans want it to say, the dynamic score slightly deflates an Obama administration claim while in many ways bolstering its robustness. Liberals, by the way, don't mind a dose of dynamic scoring when it serves their purposes. Dean Baker of the anodyne-sounding but very-liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, recently made the case for looking at the cost of student-loan forgiveness dynamically: Several news articles have reported on the potential costs of the Obama administration's plans to forgive some of the student debt associated with Corinthian Colleges. . . . In projecting the costs to the government, these pieces neglect to take account of the positive effect on incentives that eliminating this debt would have. As it stands, heavily indebted students could expect to have a large portion of any money they earn taken away from them to repay their debts. This acts as a strong disincentive to work (or possibly an incentive to work off the books) in the same way that a high tax rate would provide a disincentive to work. It is reasonable to believe that these former students will work more and pay more taxes if their debt is forgiven. This would offset some of the money that the government would lose by forgiving the debt. . . . In other words, forgiving the debt of former Corinthian students may be much less than indicated. I don't think he's wrong, but how great the effects would be, who knows, and it'd be very tricky to calculate. The problem with dynamic scoring is that static analysis is dicey enough; dynamic analysis often just adds a new level of uncertainty. But with big-picture stuff like Obamacare's effect on labor markets, as Yglesias notes, it matters, and it's sound. Is Kurdistan a Thing That's Happening? It's no secret that the only remotely-palatable-to-the-U.S. forces who are making progress against ISIS are the Kurds. "YPG," the name for the Syrian Kurdish militias, "are absolutely killing it," is how a friend who works in the Pentagon put it to me. This has raised the question of whether the Kurds -- lefties, secular, America-friendly, and spread across Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran, all states that to varying degrees don't give them a very happy home -- deserve a state of their own. The fact that a Kurdish-aligned party won representation in Turkey's parliament for the first time ever this montth has also given them a little swagger. The government of the Kurdish region of Iraq seems to be flirting a little more closely with the idea, based on this: Erbil, Kurdistan Region, Iraq (cabinet.gov.krd) - Following the passage of the Law to Raise Funds Through Borrowing by the Kurdistan Region -- Iraq, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs International have been mandated by the Kurdistan Regional Government to organize a series of meetings with international fixed-income investors in London, with a view to a potential transaction in the near future.
Safeen Dizayee
Spokesperson
Kurdistan Regional Government – Iraq What the keffiyeh does that mean? It means the Kurdish government needs or wants, and thinks it's able to, sell bonds on the international market like it's a country. One problem: the Iraqi constitution doesn't appear to let any government besides the national one raise debt. The Kurds' idea seems to be to issue bonds in the event the central government fails to give them their fair share of oil revenues (for oil that's actually produced in Kurdistan). The Kurds complain about that possibility a lot and it hasn't really come to pass, but there are obviously hard feelings. Republicans have been pushing for some time to send more aid to the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, which seems like a hard position to argue with (see, for instance, Rand Paul's case for it in NR last week). The next step could be some serious American political backing for a Kurdish state -- it's certainly not unfathomable. ADDENDA: Put this in the "nah, we're good" category.
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