The following excerpts is content from a much larger Cato Institute article “Property Rights and the Constitution” written by Roger Pilon. The full article is part of a larger work called “CATO Handbook for Policymakers.”
America’s Founders understood clearly that private property is the foundation not only of prosperity but of freedom itself. Thus, through the common law, state law, and the Constitution, they protected property rights — the rights of people to acquire, use, and dispose of property freely. With the growth of modern government, however, those rights have been seriously compromised.
It is no accident that a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to justice for all protects property rights. Property is the foundation of every right we have, including the right to be free. Every right claim, after all, is a claim to some thing — either a defensive claim to keep what one is holding or an offensive claim to something someone else is holding.
Government then follows, not to give us rights through positive law but to recognize and secure the rights we already have through natural law. Thus, to be morally legitimate, the powers of government must be derived from and consistent with those rights.
A complication arises in the case of the federal government, however, because there is no general federal police power. Rather, the Constitution establishes a government of delegated, enumerated, and thus limited powers, leaving most powers, including the general police power, with the states or the people, as the Tenth Amendment makes clear. Consistent with constitutional principle, then, whatever power the federal government has to secure rights is limited to federal territory, is incidental to one of its enumerated powers, or is entailed mainly through the amendments.
But if the police power is thus limited, then any effort to provide the public with goods and services more broadly must be accomplished under some other power, such as those, in the case of the federal government, that are enumerated in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Yet that effort will be constrained by the Takings Clause, which requires that private property taken in pursuit of such ends — whether in whole or in part is irrelevant — must be accompanied by just compensation for the owner of the property. Otherwise the costs of the benefit to the public would fall entirely on the owner. Not to put too fine a point on it, that would amount to theft. Indeed, it was to prohibit that kind of thing that the Framers wrote the Takings Clause in the first place.
Thus, the power of eminent domain — which is not enumerated in the Constitution but is implicit in the Takings Clause — is an instrumental power: It affords a means that enables government, acting under some other power, to pursue other ends — building roads, for example, or saving wildlife. Moreover, unlike the police power, the eminent domain power is not inherently legitimate: Indeed, in a state of nature, prior to the creation of government, none of us would have a right to condemn a neighbor’s property, however worthy our purpose, however much we compensated him.
Because eminent domain is a “despotic power,” it should be used rarely and only for genuinely public uses. That means uses that are broadly enjoyed by the public, rather than by some narrow part of the public; and in the case of the federal government, it means a constitutionally authorized use. In defining “public use,” however, facts matter, and sometimes there is no bright line. Nevertheless, certain general considerations can be noted. To begin, if the compensation is just, then no problem arises when title is transferred to the public for a genuine public use such as those mentioned above. Nor is there a problem when title is transferred to a private party — for example, to avoid the holdout situation that might arise with laying cable or telephone lines — provided the subsequent use is open to all on a nondiscriminatory basis, often to be regulated in the public interest. In such cases, were eminent domain available only when the public kept the title, the public would be deprived of the relative efficiencies of private ownership.
The Founders would be appalled to see what we have done to property rights over the course of the 20th century. One would never know today that their status in the Bill of Rights was equal to that of any other right. The time has come to restore respect for these most basic of rights, the foundation of all of our rights. Indeed, despotic governments have long understood that if you control property, you control the media, the churches, the political process itself. We are not, of course, at that point yet. But if regulations that provide the public with benefits continue to grow, unchecked by the need to compensate those who bear the costs, we will gradually slide to that point — and in the process we will pay an increasingly heavy price for the uncertainty and inefficiency we create. The most important price, however, will be to our system of law and justice. Owners are asking simply that their government obey the law — both the common law and the law of the Constitution. Reduced to its essence, they are saying simply this: stop stealing our property; if you must take it, do it the right way — pay for it. That hardly seems too much to ask.
