Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Another* thought re this: Many of you seem to be saying that if a government entity wanted to take the extra land in order to build and operate a particle accelerator, maybe it was jack-ass planning, but there's no constitutional objection to eminent domain. But, if the government wants to seize the land to sell it over to, say, Stanford to do exactly the same thing, that is verboten, constitutionally. Surely the public benefits of the particle accelerator are at least the same in either case (if not greater in the latter case, since bilmore and club will tell you that a private party will be much more efficient in spending money, etc.).
* Actually, the same thought as my RR hypo, but everyone ducked it, so I'll try again.
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the difference, while perhaps not of constitutional relevance, is that once the government enters into the role of merely "facilitating" transactions between two private parties, rather than taking land for its "own" use, there is no practical check on the number of takings that are likely to occur--it's merely a question of how big the checkbooks of the buyers are.
BTW, let's address railroads, because there's an important distinction there: they are common carriers (or were), which meant that the public was entitled to use them, albeit at some (often regulated) cost. Another distinction is that many of those cases are over 100 years old, and our concepts of "common" in common carrier have probably changed somewhat--they were much more public utilities than we might think of them now.
