There used to be a neighborhood there. There were houses and front porches and back yards. Then the alliance of big business and big government came, with their promises of revitalization, their finely crafted plans, their piles of money — and their bulldozers.
Today, the land that was once the Fort Trumbull neighborhood of New London, Conn., is a field of rubble. The brilliant plans of the powerful planners failed. They had torn down a neighborhood to make it nicer for a new Pfizer plant. Pfizer left the plant a few years later. Nothing has taken the place of Fort Trumbull.
It was pointless destruction. It was utter waste. But if we’re to find any hope in the overgrown field of wreckage, ten years after the Supreme Court upheld the eminent domain takings in its Kelo v. New London decision, it’s as a memorial.
The rubble of Fort Trumbull today lies as a monument to the stupid tyranny that is corporatist central planning. The weeds stand as a testimony of the need for property rights.
Property rights have many enemies and critics on the American Left. They act as if property rights are a tool the wealthy use to exacerbate inequality and wield power. Instead Kelo, along with this week’s Supreme Court ruling involving raisin growers, shows us how strong property rights — like access to the courts — are a bulwark that the ordinary woman or man can use against the powerful. Weak property rights, on the other hand, create the opportunity for the politically connected to trample the politically disfavored.
Recall how Fort Trumbull got bulldozed:
The New London Development Corporation — a public-private hybrid — crafted a grand plan to revitalize the flagging city.
Pfizer was chosen as the city’s savior: the planners bought up a 24-acre lot and sold it to the drug giant for $10. Of course, they also extended special tax breaks to Pfizer.
Pfizer executive David Burnett said that wasn’t enough. “Pfizer wants a nice place to operate,” the Hartford Courant quoted Burnett in 2001. “We don’t want to be surrounded by tenements.” He was referring to Fort Trumbull.
New London Development Corporation complied, seizing the homes of any Fort Trumbull residents who wouldn’t sell. Suzette Kelo was one such victim of eminent domain. She sued and made it to the Supreme Court where the four liberal justices and moderate Anthony Kennedy sided with the Big Business-Big Government team, and against property rights.
This week’s raisin case — Horne v. Department of Agriculture — shows similar battle lines, but a happier ending.
The case involved a New Deal law that basically allowed the government to seize raisin farmers’ crop with little to no compensation. This was part of a price-fixing scheme supported by the biggest players in the industry.
As the court explained it:
You can probably guess who took the USDA’s side: Sun-Maid, “the largest single marketer of raisins in the world” as the corporation (technically a non-profit cooperative) bragged in its brief with the Supreme Court. Sun-Maid blasts the Hornes in its brief: “Having been caught ‘free riding’ on the marketing order at the expense of their competitors, petitioners now seek refuge in high constitutional principle.”
Translated: Having refused to follow the price-fixing rules of a cartel they never wanted to join in the first place, the Hornes appealed to the crazy idea of property rights, the scoundrels. They wanted to take what they had grown and purchased and sell it to people who wanted to buy it in a way that could diminish the profits of their larger competitors.
Property rights, though enforced and defined by government, serve their most important purpose as a check on government power.
They are not absolute, and government often abridges them — occasionally for a defensible reason. And every abridgment of property rights, however crooked, comes with some noble-sounding goal, such as revitalizing a city or stabilizing crop prices.
But the removal of checks on government power always gives an advantage to those with access to the powerful within government. That’s not Marvin and Laura Horne or Suzette Kelo — it’s Sun-Maid and Pfizer.
Fort Trumbull reminds us that central planners often fail miserably in their stated goals. Both cases remind us that when government tramples on property rights, it often succeeds in enriching the insiders.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
