City threatens to take land from 94-year-old farmer

I don't like any of the poll choices. I can see using eminent domain if one or two property owners are the holdouts preventing a highway or even a public facility (although that is a bit of a stretch for me) but to take it because they can make more on taxes if it's developed???? sorry that's just sooooo wrong!

I am going to have to study this some more, but if its only about prop tax revenues it sounds like BS.

I thought ED was from the old days of putting in a cross country railroad. It seems that it should be for a major big dang reason, and friggin well compensated. My 1 acres is available for a cool $1 Billion Barry, its chump change for you guys! LOL

The Viking wrote: And this is why it is so dangerous to put liberals in the Supreme Court, and thus in the White House to appoint them.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/24/scotus.property/

Joining Stevens in the majority were justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Anthony Kennedy. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined O'Connor's dissent.

Here is a good book on the New London case:

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Pink-House-Defiance-Courage/dp/0446508624

The JeffCo lib has it as well. I was impressed that the deprivation of rights was more about the ambitions of a few characters. The problem in the end was that our government did and does not uphold our rights, but is more concerned with its best interests.

Property rights are at the foundation of America's success. They are so important to the principles of freedom and liberty that the founding fathers had much to say about them.

As we drift farther away from the ideals that made this country great - we risk everything that was fought for - by those who came before us. Local and state governments have butchered those ideals with the notion that government and "collective" interests are more important than individual rights. It's pure socialist thinking. Some day we need to take back these basic rights in order to preserve our own liberty and maybe be able to pass on some freedom and liberty to future Americans.

The government interest should NEVER trump individual liberty - especially when it comes to private property. We dont even need to look very hard to find support for this ideal. It was very well documented by those who were our founding fathers. Here's a few words from them on this subject......

"Nothing is ours, which another may deprive us of." --Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 1786. ME 5:440

Madison understood that the protection of property is the foundation of all freedoms. He said, "... a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possissions".
He also said, "Government is instituted to protect property of every sort. . . This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own." [18]

According to John Locke,

"The great chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonweaths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property." He also said, "Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience,..." -- John Locke, 2nd Treatise of Government, 1690

Stephen Hopkins, from Rhode Island, in 1764 said, "they who have no property can have no freedom."[6]

"A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will", according to Alexander Hamilton (quoted from The Federalist #79, online at http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/ Federalist/fed79.htm).

John Adams said that

"[t]he moment that idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the Laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be sacred or li berty cannot exist."[7]

"The Natural Rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second, to liberty; third to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.", according to Samuel Adams.