Beneficence: Public Benefit

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August 04, 2004

Public Benefit

Bill Schambra points me to a story he finds of interest "because we have a major apologist for the plutocratic exploiters of the masses editorializing in favor of a decision that protects small community against . . . well, plutocratic exploitation of the masses. Another category scrambler for your friends at GiftHub."

The more troubling category scrambler is that creative shift from "public use" to "public benefit" argument that created the trouble in the first place.

This is a great example of why we need to take care when presuming "benefit" and to be on guard when beneficence is justified on the grounds of "public" interest.

Poletown's Revenge
Wall Street Journal
August 3, 2004; Page A10

It must come as cold comfort to the citizens of Poletown, who back in 1981 had their homes taken away from them by the city of Detroit and bulldozed for a car factory. But the Michigan Supreme Court has finally stated the obvious: What's good for General Motors wasn't so good for the people -- and it sure didn't justify violating their "sacrosanct" Constitutional property rights.
Though Friday's decision comes nearly a quarter-century after an earlier Michigan Supreme Court cleared the way for Detroit to condemn the homes, churches, schools and hospitals of Poletown on behalf of a Cadillac plant, it's hard to overstate the significance of this reversal. By expanding the justifications for eminent domain seizures to include "economic development," the earlier decision not only ushered in the destruction of a neighborhood. It set a woeful precedent that continues to embolden unseemly coalitions of private developers and tax-hungry municipalities using government powers to take other people's land.

Friday's decision was unanimous. The lead opinion put it this way: "Poletown's 'economic benefit' rationale would validate practically any exercise of the power of eminent domain on behalf of a private entity. After all, if one's ownership of private property is forever subject to the government's determination that another private party would put one's land to better use, then the ownership of real property is perpetually threatened by the expansion plans of any large discount retailer, 'megastore,' or the like."

Exactly. Remember, we're not talking about a public highway or bridge. To the contrary, today we have governments taking land from Peter because they'd rather Paul have it. In the Michigan case, Wayne County was fighting to condemn the property of a handful of owners after they refused to sell land the county wanted to use for a business and technology park.

In one sense you can hardly blame the planners. Once the Poletown case shifted the test from "public use" to "public benefit," it put any limits on eminent domain on a slippery slope. State and local governments all across America have been happily sliding down it ever since -- and citing Poletown as their justification. The Institute for Justice reckons that between 1998 and 2002 some 10,000 private properties were either taken by or threatened with eminent domain on behalf of other private parties.

for entire article see WSJ

August 04, 2004 in Beneficence | Permalink

Comments

Thanks you and Bill for the link. Of the rights in Locke the one that stands out over and over is the right to property. To see it defended by the WSJ or Hudson does not strike me as surprising. Sadly, it seems to trump all others. Not paradox at all, but hegemony. Private property as the god-term. Now if the WSJ had come out in defense of public parks, public protest, or the subordination of property to any other principle, that would have been news.

Lenore, you are right, the latent issue is public benefit from anything other than private vices and private property (Mandeville). How do we create and maintain open spaces, commons, clean air, debate and peaceful protest? Can a case be made for those?

I see so much here and in your group that seems to take the fight against communism as still un-won. You are still fighting totalitarianism of that order. When will you address the ills of neoliberalism? The limits of the private, as it grows corporate and over-weening? Surely, in your stuff on Jesus you cannot avoid the "body of Christ," a polity that is more than atoms.

Don't mean this to be rhetorical or controversial. How in your view do you get from individuals and private property to public goods, public life, and the "leviathan" of the polity? Don't you need some version of the social contract, an understanding that includes all, rather than a market that sorts winners and losers, and discards the losers?

Given that beneficence is your theme, as opposed to the myriad benefits of selfhishness, when do you get around to the philosophical basis of our obligations to one another and to the greater good? When do you subordinate selfishness to caritas? And how can you blog Jesus one day, and the self-sufficiency of markets the next? Seems like a mind divided. Two programs running on the same hard disk, but without communication between them.

"Friends hold all in common." In Athens as in the Primitive Church?

I can understand you, Hein and Schambra getting hired by some selifsh SOB of a self-made billionaire to write paens to private property. To construct a "science of liberty" based on his freedom to use his wealth and power as he pleases. I can see why he would want you to work round to saying that the EPA and the IRS are like communists in some way. And I can understand why, seeking tax breaks, your funder would want to discredit progressive social programs. And I can understand that he would want you to say (or straight-facedly pretend) that private philanthropy will take up the slack, as long as no one asks him for a gift. But to make this stuff on beneficence plausible, you need a theory of caritas, altruism, compassion, public goods, the gift, and of the obligations of wealth.

Every time your theory, based on Hayek, falls to its knees, you sound the trumpets and trot out Christ. But you have not reconciled either the theory or the prose styles. Christ is the purple patch on your Roman toga.

Would love to see you, Jay, and Bill write a piece in the style of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Montaigne, Pascal or Bacon, entitled, "On the Obligations of Wealth," or "The Uses of Riches."

If your funders object, do it under an assumed name. Or, tell them that you mean other people's oblgiation, that you are going to encourage the poor to give one another, as Christ said.

Posted by: phil | August 05, 2004 at 03:26 PM

Great questions and challenges, Phil. And ones on which I am working as we exchange notes today. I'm writing now an introduction to the first volume of Conversations, the journal I'm creating for The Project for New Philanthropy Studies, which begins to take up some of these challenges.

I'll quickly pass by the paragraph on the funders of conservative think tanks for now, since I think it is the flip side of the coin you point out. If conservatives continue to struggle with the red herring of failed communism, you progressivists seem to continue to sling arrows at this right-wing conspiracy of the wealthy. Why, for instance, would you presume any such funder to be automatically an SOB? I don't take Marx that way, though the case could be made I suspect for both Lenin and Stalin.

Hope you'll go over and read my post on original sin, in which I begin to take up the questions you pose on eccleciology seriously. And I've been doing so in more than one circle today!

And while I don't have time to get everything translated into the blog, I have just been in correspondence with an Austrian economist friend of mine about our conversations in Chicago. From which conversations I am beginning to think about property rights not in absolutist, Lockean terms but largely as a form of decision rights that are socially constructed--by the rule of law in the best instances (rather than merely by power). I would think you would find comfort in the fact that the WSJ, in applauding the court's limitation of eminent domain, was here defending the right rather than the powerful.

This issue of public benefit is a slippery slope. But to acknowledge that does not mean that there are only private, atomized interests. I look forward to unveiling the forthcoming publication, in which I have invited several authors to begin reflecting on these very questions. This is the invitation you turned down, remember!! Not to worry, you won't escape contributing to this non-satirical conversation in the end!

Hopefully I don't trot out Christ to rescue Hayek, nor Hayek to rescue Christ. I see all these voices in conversation one with another. In the end, I have no doubt which is most authoritative to me--but ultimate authorities are often conversation stoppers rather than starters.

I'm hopeful that my theological contributions can be taken as extending and deepening the conversation, not stopping it. But this brings us back to that discussion of the Areopagitica and the virtues of civil discourse.

Posted by: Lenore Ealy | August 05, 2004 at 03:55 PM