Paradocracy

The modern doctrine of ‘eminent domain’ is symbolic of the nature of government, encapsulating the essence of the chronicled expansion of federal authority. The encroachments of government through the fiction of ‘eminent domain’ have not just weakened the Fourth Amendment’s protections against seizures; they have willfully distorted the original intent, language and purpose of the Fifth Amendment, while making all persons and private property susceptible to the will and weight of government — a government growing ever haughtier and heavier.

Federal officials have willfully betrayed the spirit and the language of the Bill of Rights by construing it to disparage the rights of the states and of the people, by interpreting the language as license to expand at will the power of the federal government on the basis of loose interpretations; that is despite the fact that the legislative powers of government are strictly enumerated not in the Bill of Rights but in Article I, Section 10, of the Constitution; and that is despite the fact that the Bill of Rights was added as a supplement to the Constitution to assuage the apprehensions of skeptics and Anti-Federalists who feared big government and correctly anticipated the kind of tyranny that would come from the new form of government in the absence of basic protections for the benefit of the people and the states, whose rights were said to be “numerous and indefinite” in comparison to the powers of the federal government, which were said (under the new Constitution) to be “few and defined” (as phrased by James Madison in Federalist No. 45). 

It is precisely through this wrongheaded view of the Constitution that government officials came to view “property” (in the context of the Fifth Amendment) as if it pertains to real estate, farms, and homesteads, even though the Constitution nowhere expressly grants such sweeping authority to the federal government. Likewise, they have taken the simple words “private property” and “taken” and inflated them into license for permanent and unlimited confiscation of any and all property, including land and homes. In the original understanding, “private property” in the Fifth Amendment referred foremost to basic movable necessities — livestock, equipment, tools, and other movable materials that might be consumed or requisitioned temporarily in war or emergency and then replaced at par — not to the wholesale ‘condemnation’ of families’ homesteads or large swaths of land in any state.

Episodes such as the government’s 1942 seizure of the land that became Oak Ridge, Tennessee, illustrate how far modern practice has drifted from this constitutional foundation. In the case of Oak Ridge, in which the U. S. government seized sixty thousand acres of farmland, approximately four thousand people were evicted from their multigenerational farms on short notice, given only a couple of weeks to leave, and the so-called ‘just compensation’ they received was determined not by genuine market forces (nor by approximate replacement values) but by prices and appraisals determined arbitrarily by government officials or shaped artificially by wartime economic policies designed by the federal government itself — and above all, this was ‘just compensation’ not just of questionable value but offered and accepted under questionable circumstances of great duress. This sets a dangerous precedent, not just in the implications for private property and individual liberty, but for the way in which value and ‘justice’ are determined through systems ever more convoluted and compromised by conflicts of interest. 

The fact that the Fifth Amendment is so often deliberately misconstrued to support this kind of seizure implies not only a willful misinterpretation but a misunderstanding of the whole Constitution, the conventions and circumstances of the time, and the very people who wrote the text; a people who, in their time, couldn’t even have conceived of a government powerful or brazen enough to evict thousands of its own citizens in the seizure of tens or hundreds of thousands of acres of private land. All of this exposes an ignorance to essential history, and it reveals the deadly web they weave through soft despotism, whereby they control the language, the interpretation, the narrative, and the resources. And where government enjoys the power of ‘eminent domain’ along with control over the country’s currency, this amounts not just to power in policy but to power in the extreme.

A government that actively manipulates asset prices through economic and monetary policies can then turn around and use those same government-manufactured values to claim that it has met the requirement of “just compensation”. When the government defines and “regulates” the market, and then uses the market as its basis for determining “just compensation”, it wields a power not merely broad and unconstitutional but total and underhanded. Under this arrangement, the government has the power to “take” nearly any category of property — real estate included, under its own liberal interpretations — at its own discretion and at prices determined by its own policies. Through this suite of powers, there is little preventing government from staking its claim on any and every thing — and making its case is, of course, aided not only by the fact that government controls the language, the narrative, and the range of allowable opinion, but by the fact that it possesses sufficient power and influence to keep enough people quiet and in conformity so that the dissenters feel alone, outnumbered, and powerless.

These fears were not unique to the twentieth century. Long before the rise of massive federal projects and wartime industrialization, many Americans warned that unchecked national authority could become a force within each state, that federal rulings on and asserted interests in private property threatened to open the door to ever more incursions on the states, the people, their individual rights and their local institutions. Before and during the War between the States, remembered properly in certain Southern traditions as the War of Northern Aggression, Southerners (and many sympathizers in the North) asserted that the federal government had extended its reach beyond defined constitutional limits, not merely in mobilizing troops to invade a state, not only in denying a state the right to secede or in maintaining a standing military presence where a state had offered just compensation for a fort within its borders, not just in the institution of disproportionate economic hardships (i. e. tariffs) for the benefit of regional, industrial, or lobbied interests, but in its mistreatment and violation of ‘property’ and established law per the Constitution. 

The constitutional argument made then, as it is expressed here now, reflects a longstanding strain of American suspicion toward consolidated federal power. They held that the ‘general welfare’ clause and any broad language susceptible to loose interpretation might be used to impose on the individual, his liberty, and his private property, all while circumventing the limitations built into the Constitution. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments served to defend against this veritable threat. The Ninth Amendment served to protect against the ambitions of political agents and activists who might misconstrue the language of the Bill of Rights to “deny or disparage [other rights] retained by the people,” while the Tenth Amendment stood at the heart of their reading of the Constitution. The ‘cornerstone’ of the Constitution, as Thomas Jefferson regarded it, the Tenth Amendment was intended to guard each state and its people against precisely the sort of expansive federal ambitions they believed they were witnessing. The text of the Tenth Amendment serves to make absolutely clear that the powers of the federal government are, as James Madison put it, “few and defined”: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” However, as history has shown, these sacred words failed to keep the federal government from making “conquered provinces” of the states (as Thaddeus Stevens boasted at the end of the War between the States), just as they have failed to protect the people from a government hungry for power and property.

Indeed, progressive expansions of ‘eminent domain’ authority have only affirmed the longstanding anxieties of patriots and skeptics. Judicial interpretations stretching the concepts of “public use” or “general welfare” to corroborate broad and malleable claims of public purpose opened the door for governments to displace entire communities for redevelopment, ‘internal improvements’, or projects said — by government officials and propagandists, not necessarily by the people — to serve some national or public interest. When the same government that shapes economic policy also decides what qualifies as fair or ‘just’ compensation, the protections supposedly provided by the Bill of Rights become hollow. The result is a system in which power is unrestrained while the rights of the individual grow fragile. 

This was never the intention behind the language of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Those documents were drafted to specifically enumerate the “few and defined” powers of the federal government, to preserve the sovereignty of the several states, and likewise to prevent the federal government from inserting itself into the domestic affairs and institutions of each state, and from seizing the lands, homes, and livelihoods of private citizens under the flimsy, flexible and ever-fashionable theories furnished under the guise of the “common good”. 

Where government assumes powers never expressly granted, and where rights to life, liberty and property are waived in the face of stated ‘exigencies’, the security of personal property and individual liberty inevitably gives way to a kind of ‘eminent domain’ which applies everywhere and which subjects any and all property to imminent confiscation, as soon as government gets around to expressing a need or an explanation that enough people will tolerate. 

As for the matter of ‘just compensation’, it’s a moot point where government is already in control of economic policy as well as the money supply. As is the case in such ‘developed countries’ as the United States, it’s made even simpler for government where it also has its hands on the printing press and digital media; in which cases matters of “justice” and public opinion are just as easy to control as the money they print at will, or which they otherwise digitally create out of thin air, along with their deliberate reimaginings of law, language and history. Under this kind of arrangement, it is only a matter of time until some exigency or excuse makes a case for your labor, your property, or your liberty; and it is precisely in this way that ‘eminent domain’ (and the kind of thinking which supports it) threatens imminent domination.