Ayn Rand vs. eminent domain — VOICES for REASON

A recently published book, Objectively Speaking, contains edited transcripts of some fascinating interviews Ayn Rand gave in the mid-1960s.

One of the interviews caught my eye because she discussed a legal issue that’s been in the news recently. The issue involves eminent domain (the government’s power to seize private property without the owner’s consent).

She began by making clear her radical position against eminent domain. She saw it as a “strictly statist principle” whose presence in the Constitution is a “major contradiction” to the principle of property rights. Then she analyzed problems that eminent domain causes in practice:

It gives government the right to seize any property it wishes, provided there is “just compensation”–a vague term that leaves open the question: Who determines what is just? This power is now being used not even for any alleged “public purpose,” but for the benefit of some private individuals at the expense of others–for the benefit of private builders subsidized by the government and armed with the power to destroy anyone’s property rights by invoking eminent domain.

I was struck by her singling out an issue that’s still making news–the seizure of one person’s private property to benefit another private individual, under the eminent domain power. This was the same broad power that, unfortunately, the Supreme Court upheld in the Kelo case a few years ago. Susette Kelo, a Connecticut homeowner represented by the Institute for Justice, was thrown out of her house against her will to make way for a retail development. The City of New London excused its actions by pointing to the “public purpose” of fostering a richer tax base.

The interviews in Objectively Speaking cover a range of interesting political issues, such as objective law, universal suffrage, government’s “rights,” the legal status of labor unions, the value of constitutions, the role of a free press, the importance of geography in political representation, and methods of selecting judges, with Ayn Rand adding depth and detail to views that she expressed elsewhere in writing.