MY MOTHER-IN-LAW is just this side of 90, and has the ailments that are normally associated with her advanced years. She is, in fact, more or less housebound, leaving only to visit her stable of doctors or for emergencies–such as last week’s trial in a Baltimore city court, in which she found herself “The Defendant,” a pretty scary designation for anyone, much less an old woman. More about that in a minute. Her immobility has one advantage: It permits her to indulge her passion for television news. Either because her late husband was a print journalist, or in spite of that fact, she prefers television to newspapers. Well, not all television. The major networks she regards as useless because of their liberal bias–except when George Will appears on Sundays. CNN she considers to be a hopeless example of leftish prejudice. Only Fox tells it like it is, in her judgment, although she finds unsettling the appearance of Bill Kristol when he criticizes the administration. I’m not sure what she thinks of Geraldo and Greta, the CNN fugitives wooed away by Fox, but suspect she is suspending judgment until she sees whether they have shed the effects of their prior unsavory association. My mother-in-law has been able to indulge her passion for news-watching in relative comfort because her father willed her an income-producing building in the heart of downtown Baltimore. It contains one store, has never been vacant, and along with Social Security and some savings wrung from her journalist-husband’s modest salary, allows her the independence she values. Or did. The city decided that the area in which the store was located should be redeveloped, and took the property under the constitutional provision that permits such “taking” for a public purpose. But there has to be just compensation. A bright and mentally alert lady, my mother-in-law has what seems to this economist a reasonable notion of what she should have gotten–enough money so that, invested, it would yield the income she was getting before the city took her building, adjusting for any difference that might exist in the riskiness of the old and new investments. The city disagreed and, the way things worked, mailed her a check for about a third of that amount. The city’s appraiser picked a number that was well below what the city had determined for tax purposes. In short, when it set the value for tax purposes, the city said this property is valuable; when it decided to use its power to snatch it, it decided the value was far less. And, of course, it proceeded to knock down the building. So much for any right to appeal the taking of her building, now reduced to rubble. Because she wanted more than the city offered, she went to law, as sophisticates say. This meant hiring a lawyer and an independent appraiser in order to contest the city’s valuation. Since my mother-in-law is no passive litigant, it also meant getting to court in a wheelchair to tell the jury just what she thought she was entitled to have. The jury considered the bewildering computations of the competing appraisers, and did what juries tend to do–it split the difference. “Property is theft,” claimed Proudhon some 160 years ago. Which I suppose summarizes the belief of the city bureaucrats who seem determined to let nothing like fairness stand between them and their plans for urban redevelopment, in this case a project that involved the eviction from their little stores of numerous struggling minority entrepreneurs. Were my father-in-law, a Virginian to his core, still alive he would probably encourage his wife to remind whatever appellate forum is available that the Virginia Bill of Rights, drafted at almost the same time as Proudhon made his announcement, proclaims that when men “enter into a state of society” they are guaranteed “the means of acquiring and possessing property.” Indeed, his widow is still toying with the idea that somewhere there is a court that will right the wrong done her. The names of two of her heroes, Scalia and Thomas, leap to her mind. But the chance of prevailing in her lifetime is too slim to make it worthwhile to carry the fight upward through the court system. Not to mention the expense. If there is a difference between taking property from an unwilling owner at a price that is far less than either its market value or any semblance of just compensation, and theft, or at best Frederic Bastiat’s “lawful plunder,” it eludes all save the savviest condemnation lawyer and the most fervent believer in urban development schemes. It certainly eludes a 90-year-old Baltimore woman who thought a lifetime of careful planning and scrimping had assured an independent old age. Irwin M. Stelzer
