> Why is there any need to make complex economic determinations about
> expected "benefits"? The direct and immediate benefit is profit, which
> is private. (Employment isn't a public benefit anyway; it's a
> dependence.) Eminent domain is supposed to be reserved for public uses
> (i.e., anything sans private profit). It's really that simple, isn't
> it? If private profit is the direct and immediate effect, it is a
> taking for private use, and therefore unconstitutional.
So if you grab property for a free road, and private trucking companies use it to increase their profits, that's not public use?
And if you grab land for a government run Tennessee Valley Authority and give subsidized power to private businesses, which increases their profits, that's not a public use.
And if the government provides subsidized health care to an employer, cutting his health care costs and increasing his profits, that's not public interest either?
The point is that all sorts of government-owned operations heavily benefit private profits.
And conversely, government can lease land to private industry -- as happened in the New London case --and potentially gain public benefits such as increased jobs and wages.
> I also want to take issue with comments made somewhere upriver about
> "fair market value" and the perversion of it in the eminent domain
> context. For capitalists, the fair market value of something is
> whatever it can sell for on the market. If a lone holdout doesn't want
> to sell his property, he doesn't "distort" the fair market value of his
> property by holding out. The fair market value of his property is
> defined by his very willingness to sell it.
Except a "hold-out" is a monopolist. Markets are based on the ability to substitute goods for any particular product and find an equilibrium price. For an individual looking for a piece of property, many pieces of property are substitutable for one another for a particular use, so there is a market value for property.
But in the case of eminent domain, a particular piece of property is needed to complete a project. There is no possible substitute, so you are not in a market situation but a monopoly situation. Which allows the property owner to exercise monopoly pricing power and get above what would be a market price for a normal property purchaser.
So market value is what the property would go for in a non-monopoly situation by the property owner.
Nathan Newman