Excerpt
A scholar with the Congressional Research Service called it “inevitable”—as American industry expands, resources A are developed, and population grows, government will attempt to control this growth with increasing levels of regulation. Eventually this regulation will “collide with constitutional property rights.”
The day of that “collision” is here. Almost every day the federal government issues a new ream of regulations placing restrictions on the use of private property. And the Courts are more and more finding that this regulation treads on private property rights, necessitating “just compensation” to the owner. The U.S. government currently faces over $1 billion in claims that it has usurped the private property of individuals. In just three such cases last year, the U.S. Claims Court awarded compensation totalling over $120 million. And in California, those property owners who can afford to sue the government are winning in the intermediate appeals courts more than half the time.
The principle that government can “take” private property inadvertently through over-regulation (as compared to official condemnation) is not new. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing the Supreme Court opinion for the 1922 case …
Footnotes
Steve Symms is a member of the U.S. Senate from Idaho, 509 Hart Building, Washington, D.C. 20510.
- Copyright 1991 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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