Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

In that case, the Court justified the taking based on the number of jobs that would be created by the plant (6,000) and the assurances that it would be for “public use.”16 The City of New London did not even bother to make this type of assurance. It just asked the Court to take its word for it, and five justices listened.

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!

On November 9, 2009, to add insult to injury, Pfizer announced that it would leave New London in 2011, moving most of its New London employees to nearby Groton, Connecticut.17 Pfizer’s exit proves that the New London City Council, shockingly, is not as intelligent as it originally thought. The “urban village” was never built, and the land that the City took remains barren.18 According to Scott G. Bullock, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, the New London debacle “really shows the folly of these plans that use massive corporate welfare and abuse eminent domain for private development. They oftentimes fail to live up to expectations.”19 Tell me about it.

Thankfully, the Kelo saga wasn’t a total loss. Legislators in forty-three states, in response to New London’s abuse of power, passed statutes prohibiting similar exercises of the eminent domain power.20 Regardless, governments should not have to pass laws requiring themselves to operate within the Fifth Amendment. Americans are under the impression that obeying the Constitution is part of the government’s job.

A Man’s Word Is His Bond

The freedom to contract is another right derived from Natural Law. One law review article noted:

Freedom of contract, together with the right to own property, were core elements in the American vision of personal liberty . . . The American constitutional scheme places contract liberty well above common law status; it is a guaranteed personal right. Liberty of contract is recognized not as power delegated by the sovereign, but as power originating in and guaranteed to the people.21

In other words, it is a natural right. You agree to pay me X dollars for this book, and I agree upon receipt of the X dollars to deliver you the book. The right to enter into that agreement is a natural right; the right to have that agreement enforced is one of the aspects of human freedom that governments exist in order to protect. At one time in our history, these rights—to enter into a binding contract and to use the government to enforce the contract—were guaranteed. Sadly, now that is no longer the case.

In a way, people who enter into contracts with each other make law for themselves because the government is constitutionally restrained from interfering unless there is a breach of the contract or the essence of the contract is unlawful. Yet, like our right to private property, our natural right to contract, as well as the rights defined in the Contracts Clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section 10, Clause 1), have repeatedly been violated by the government.

One of the greatest cases of government assaults on the right to contract was in Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934), where the U.S. Supreme Court upheld as constitutional a Minnesota law prohibiting banks from foreclosing upon mortgages that were in default. John and Rosella Blaisdell had borrowed money from Home Building & Loan to buy a house. The agreement, which was freely made between the Blaisdells and the bank, specified that if the Blaisdells defaulted on the loan, the bank could foreclose on the house, sell it, pay itself back the unpaid loan, and then turn over any remaining amount, what lawyers and economists call equity, to the Blaisdells. But the “government-knows-best” attitude in the State of Minnesota would have none of this freedom. It chose the value of people living for free over the value of enforcing freely entered contracts. It imposed a moratorium on home foreclosures, and the Blaisdells, preferring to live for free, took advantage of that.

Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court held that it was constitutional if Minnesota stopped the banks from foreclosing on mortgages when the borrower defaulted. So, what was the Court’s justification for this blatant disregard of both our natural rights and the Contracts Clause? Was there a justification? In Blaisdell, the Supreme Court tore the Constitution’s Contracts Clause to shreds by allowing state interference with private contracts (those as to which the government is not a contracting party) whenever state legislatures found a “valid police purpose”22 that interfered with the remedy (foreclosure), not the contract (the promise to repay a loan). So, in truth, the State can butt into our personal right to contract, whenever it feels like it,23 so long as it doesn’t blatantly outlaw contracts, just their remedies. The Blaisdells still owed the bank the money they borrowed; the bank just couldn’t get the money back until the State of Minnesota said it could.

Justice Sutherland wrote in his dissent:

[W]hether the legislation under review is wise or unwise is a matter with which we have nothing to do. Whether it is likely to work well or work ill presents a question entirely irrelevant to the issue. The only legitimate inquiry we can make is whether it is constitutional. If it is not, its virtues, if it has any, cannot save it; if it is, its faults cannot be invoked to accomplish its destruction. If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.24 (emphases added)

Obviously Justice Sutherland understood not only the nature of the Contracts Clause, but the natural right to contract and the spirit of the entire Constitution. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. The oath to enforce and uphold it is taken by everyone in the government. They are charged with enforcing its terms—upholding the liberty it guarantees—whether that liberty pinches or comforts. The Blaisdell result is not the way the Framers intended the Constitution to be used.

The buck did not stop at Blaisdell. Today, in the wake of the Chrysler