A large corporation arriving in a foreign country, manipulating the local government into forcing people out of their homes so that the corporation can take the land for their own purposes. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
I'm not saying it's right or good, but I am saying that America's success in the 20th century was in part due to these exact tactics used on other countries around the world. And based on history, I would say you need to stand up and fight this sort of thing because it only gets worse.
Eminent domain abuse is much more than just multinationals. Far more people have lost their homes to politically desirable highways and reservoirs than to Evil Foreign Actors. Most of the time, even, it seems like a good trade in hindsight.
I don't know anything about this particular situation. But personally, as long as there's a reasonably justified need (a new factory seems like it would qualify) and the evicted are appropriately compensated ("fair" can be hard to quantify, of course), I don't see that this is something we need to be outraged about.
Why would a factory qualify as a reasonably justified need? Unless it produces weapons in wartime, it’s a private entity engaging in private business and the government’s role ought to be limited to making sure everyone plays by the rules. If the factory needs a bunch of land, it should have to buy that land just like you or I would. If it’s not practical for some reason, then the factory should be built elsewhere, or not be built at all.
ESID, but some rural areas really, really need the jobs that would be created a lot more than the sentiments of a handful of people who don't want to move. In such cases it's in the community's best interest to displace holdouts in order to grow the local economy.
If it's a rural area, surely they can build the factor in a place where they don't have to destroy people's homes, no? Even if the state/county has to build new roads, power lines, water mains, etc. to support a new locale, seems like that would be better than taking people's land away.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of using eminent domain to take land for public projects, but for a private company? Nope. That's simply insane.
Impeding, or just not encouraging, job growth in rural communities devastates them far more than rare eminent domain issues. Building all new infrastructure can quickly turn an endeavor unprofitable, resulting in it not being done at all.
There is a balance, but I favor the use of eminent domain to expand economic opportunities to rural areas, as long as the buyouts are above market rate. Those that are affected are often the wealthier and older homeowners, not the struggling young families that most need help.
This is all very easy when it's "them". An HN user looks from afar and decide what's better for those rural folk. Those undeveloped types. The basket.
The reality: the government is attempting to take these peoples' property, ultimately under threat of force, in order to transfer it to a for-profit corporation in violation of state law. It does not meet the legal requirements for blight or for eminent domain under Wisconsin law. It is illegal.
Watch someone try to illegally bulldoze your own home you paid for and built, making you incur substantial moving expenses and disruption, destroying a place where you've built memories – all in exchange for a bunch of Foxconn temp agency jobs – and then tell me how you feel.
Then find a way to do it that's legal. The scheme described in the article is illegal, and illegal activity is the most short-sighted way possible to economic growth. The area is prima facie not blighted as described by Wisconsin statute, and is therefore prohibited from being subjected to eminent domain for purposes of transfer to a private corporation.
That must be why Foxconn factories have -extensive- barbed wire on top of their buildings to prevent employee suicides.
Second, can we please agree this is NOT eminent domain. This is about government corruption to lower the cost of the eminent domain action to follow. Eminent domain would be that the government buys the house at market price, so that the people can buy a reasonably similar house somewhere else. That would, of course, satisfy all your objections.
The government is working to destroy these houses without compensation, so they can save something like perhaps $5 million (maybe not even that) while throwing these people into the street.
People are not opposed to this because their opinion is that these homeowners should be allowed to block economic development of a large area. People are opposed to this because they do not believe throwing these people into the street to save the government and the biggest corporation on the planet a small amount of money is acceptable. The government should be forced to pay as normal under eminent domain rules, and it should extract that money from the company wishing to settle there.
It strikes me as more than a little Orwellian to describe basic respect for property rights as "impeding job growth." What next, failing to plead guilty in court is impeding justice?
Every government that ever existed more than transiently did this sort of thing. It's done every time the government wants to put in a road, a palace, a port, a fortification, a school, a prison, a military base, a nationalized industry, etc.
It's easier for communist countries, though, because the government already confiscated everything.
And all that needs to happen is to take a few people, through corruption (that's what government fraud is called) declare the result of 20 years of saving (those houses) worthless and then throw them into the street.
Do you really think that people will benefit under a government/company combination that finds these actions acceptable ?
No, they objectively aren’t. That’s the entire reason they are categorizing the houses are blighted:
>on their properties. Many brought pictures. “We spent our life savings on this thing, and now we gotta move,” said Alfredo Ortiz, an 18-year resident. “It’s an insult,” he added, reflecting the general mood of the testimonies. It was extremely personal for these residents; having your carefully maintained residence, or in at least one case, recently built dream home, designated as blighted.
It’s weird though because republicans are normally the defenders of propert rights, but I guess they always do default to favoring the rich over the poor so this is still consistent. Just compare the quality of life and wages from Wisconsin (republican stronghold) to Minnesota (democrat controlled) and it’s obvious which is better run...
This happened where I live in Brooklyn to make way for the Barclays Center. New condos, without so much as the paint dry, as well as townhouses and commercial buildings, were labeled as blight to rationalize the crooked eminent domain process. Check out the movie "Battle For Brooklyn" for more on the story.
The abuse of eminent domain to make way for the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas was so bad that they amended the state constitution to prevent it from happening again.
I'll check it out. I live in Park Slope. What a joke. How about if you want to buy land, you make offers people can't refuse - that's suppose to be how capitalism works.
Eminent domain often seems unfair, but in any situation where everyone must agree to a plan, being the last holdout gives a person power that they really didn't do anything to deserve either. I'm not sure anybody believes that getting everybody to agree on something should always be required to make progress.
Something that comes to mind are the bondholder holdouts that objected to Venezuela's debt restructuring. You may side with the people being bullied by the rich and powerful in any circumstance, but that doesn't uniformly lead to defending holdouts.
My point is, no, paying any price is not how things work in capitalist societies or anywhere, because it's not practical, regardless of how unfair this particular instance is.
Edit: Wow, fastest downvote ever. Wonder if it is automated somehow. I don't think the ability (and prevalence) of downvoting opinions you disagree with contributes to the professed goals of HN. I appreciate strict moderation for civility, but given the ability to downvote rather than engage with (or ignore) a polite comment, people tend to abuse it.
I guess it depends on your definition progress. As far as being the last holdout, they did do something to "deserve" the power... They held out. And sometimes that backfires (see the Up house) you shouldn't be made to give up your property, because someone else wants to use it to make money.
I think there are times when eminent domain should be used, but building a stadium, or a mall, is not one of them.
It's not morally comparable, which is an essential part of my point. I think perhaps my comment is inspiring kneejerk reactions as though I was defending this instance of eminent domain, but it was a response to the direct parent, which was attacking something much broader than this instance.
Coordination problems preventing people from making collective progress are real, and mechanisms for eminent domain exist to deal with those real problems, is all I'm saying.
That is independent of whether some holdouts are righteous or not in particular circumstances.
To repeat, please interpret my comments in the context of what I am responding to, not just the article link.
That’s the natural conclusion of an individual rights based economy though. There are rules, and the rules lead to concentrations of power, but the rules apply the same to everyone and anyone can take a shot at trying to get that at that concentration of power.
Of course, capital is used to bend the rules, and that becomes unfair, but that’s a whole other topic...
There are places where there is no presumption of rules uniformly applied.
If Oakland were in China, for example, they might decide that East Oakland is a little shabby and has a crime problem, and so they’re just going to raze the whole area and build a new high density eco-city to provide housing for San Francisco offices.
Heck, they might do that to the Sunset!
But that’s not how America works. The people in East Oakland bought the rights to that land. They own it, and so long as they obey the statutes of the city it doesn’t matter how valuable the driving-out of those people might be, if it’s less than the buy-out cost it’s not legally feasible.
The entire system relies on this principle. If I can’t rely on my land being sold at a price I set then I can’t make complex plans based on land use and prices. I have to add in a “government force” slush factor to every calculation and many delicate plans become too risky to try.
As per the top comment in the thread, this is something ameica frequently does to other countries. really, it's the basis of America: the argument is still that it looked shabby under the native Americans, so the Americans were right to take it from them without compensation
Robin Hanson has a recent post[0] that says this relating to eminent domain, and I thought it is pretty interesting in the context of this discussion:
"Last October I posted[1] on Eric Posner and Glen Weyl’s proposal to generalize self-assessed property taxes. For many items, such as land and buildings, you’d pay an annual tax that is a standard percentage of your self-set sale-offer price for the item. This would avoid administrative property valuations, discourage people from sitting on stuff they don’t use, and make it much easier to assemble property into large units. Eminent domain would no longer be needed. They have a new book, Radical Markets, coming out in a few weeks, that I will review soon.
Some libertarian types disapprove on the grounds that this weakens property rights. Which it can, relative to a simple absolute property right. But simple property and liability have long been two quite different, and extreme, solutions to legal problems. Neither one is always best. In this post I want to point out that this alternate approach can be used not only to change traditional property to be more like liability, it can also be used to change traditional liability to be more like property. It is an interesting intermediate form between traditional property and liability. One I expect libertarian types to look on more favorably when applied to liability."
It's not automated, it's because the article specifically details how a type of blight designation is being misused as an attempted end-run around a state law that specifically prohibits use of eminent domain for this purpose. The area is not blighted. The crime rate does not meet the legal requirement. The scheme is illegal.
Why isn’t is practical, exactly? Disney World managed to pull it off, and I’m sure there are a ton of other examples. Eminent domain for private projects is the exception, not the rule.
I actually wonder about this a bit. Wisconsin gave huge tax breaks to get that company in. So now in order to buy the land, they have to evict the land owners by marking the property as "blighted", because apparently they can't afford the actual market price of the land.
The article mentions that many (all?) of the landowners, except for some owners of farmland that has already been purchased, haven't received any offers from the county, despite the fact that the assessment process has been completed for some time. It's... fishy, to put it mildly.
“And the Creuziger family, with 420 acres the largest landowner in the Foxconn area, has turned down the village’s $50,000 an acre offer for open land.”
So? Why should the state be able to decide if I should have to move if I don't want to just because they decided they wanted to handout tax breaks to company?
That seems like a pretty generous offer. For comparison, that comes out to around $1150 per square foot, which is what a lot of (developed) real estate is going for in SF right now.
Still, though, I think it's disgusting to use eminent domain in order to turn land over to a private company.
I probably miss something here, but why are American citizens kicked off from their land for a Chinese firm on American soil? Is this how you make your country great again? By selling yourself to the highest bidder?
In the country I live in the ruling party is actively destroying high level education so that we may give even cheaper work force in the future to the foreign (mostly Chinese) companies (along with huge tax cuts) - we also have a program where we decrease unemployment by forced governmental employment (for something much much lower than the minimum wage), but the system is abused in a way that people are fired and then taken back to their original workplace for the lowest possible wage.
And my friends don't understand why I feel totally disgusted by politics and why I think politicians are worse than criminals.
I believe the apathy you express is more dangerous than words can describe.
What we see in the article is the most healthy, highest functioning form of government -- disparate interests working through the system to resolve their interests. If the pervasive and infectious apathy your posts contains were more widespread, the whole system would break down, as one party dominates an apathetic counterpart. This is why they must fight, if not to promote the highest form of government, then to protect their homes.
That being said, not sure where ya live, so maybe it's different around there.
Probably you're right - I think they must fight, it's just a shame that it had to come to fighting that this cold hearted exploitation can happen in the 21st century.
I live in one country of the Visegrad Four and our whole region is shifting to right wing populism with an unstoppable acceleration; if you mix this political climate with the resurgence of "wild capitalism" the end result is either hatred and fear or apathy on a massive scale.
I'm not sure if Trump is making America great - to me it seems that he's unchaining a capitalist machine and kicking Iustitia to the curb in the process, feigning stupidity and ignorance.
Do the owners have any recourse that may work? If the state can do this here, why can't cities do something similar when they want to have higher density housing?
The owners can try to sue or challenge it, in this case it may work. In other cases it's not so good. Check out the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and the fight that went down.
If only Jefferson had kept the right to property in the Declaration of Independence, maybe the Bill of Rights would have had it too, "eminent domain" would be an archaic device reminiscent of royal tyranny, and we would all be a lot freer and wealthier. The future belongs to us, so we could get rid of such tyrannical power, ourselves.
Eh, I'm not sure I agree. I think eminent domain is useful, if not essential, in cases where land is needed for public infrastructure projects. But allowing its use in order to give land to a private company is going too far.
Eminent domain is a despotic power; to grant any legitimacy to the taking of property for "public use" is the abhorrent tip of a wedge, even with supposedly "just compensation." This should have become clear to all after the 2005 Kelo decision. [1]
Recommended reading: Property Rights and Eminent Domain by Ellen Frankel Paul [2]
> “I’m a tax-paying citizen and I deserve better than this, to just be kicked to the curb and thrown out of my residence.”
oh but you don't understand. The jobs will be so plentiful. We sacrifice you at the altar of our corporate overlords and the jobs will just rain down from the heavens and fix everything.
I've completely lost faith in our judicial system.
Judges do whatever they want, and even when things are blatantly corrupt nobody seems to care. Laws are twisted to suit their purposes and a Judges decision can't be questioned.
>We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual.
>We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives, and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to live in whatever manner they choose.
>Governments throughout history have regularly operated on the opposite principle, that the State has the right to dispose of the lives of individuals and the fruits of their labor. Even within the United States, all political parties other than our own grant to government the right to regulate the lives of individuals and seize the fruits of their labor without their consent.
>We, on the contrary, deny the right of any government to do these things, and hold that where governments exist, they must not violate the rights of any individual: namely, (1) the right to life—accordingly we support the prohibition of the initiation of physical force against others; (2) the right to liberty of speech and action—accordingly we oppose all attempts by government to abridge the freedom of speech and press, as well as government censorship in any form; and (3) the right to property—accordingly we oppose all government interference with private property, such as confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain, and support the prohibition of robbery, trespass, fraud, and misrepresentation.
>Since governments, when instituted, must not violate individual rights, we oppose all interference by government in the areas of voluntary and contractual relations among individuals. People should not be forced to sacrifice their lives and property for the benefit of others. They should be left free by government to deal with one another as free traders; and the resultant economic system, the only one compatible with the protection of individual rights, is the free market.
- The American Libertarian Party Statement of Principles
Depends which Libertarian you talk to, there are left wingers who are opposed to private property altogether and on the other side there are the ones that think the right of private property is one of the greatest goods.
Since there would be no government to enforce this right, the latter category is strongly in favor of the right to bear arms.
The right to bear arms alone isn't sufficient to maintain the right of private property, since it means that anyone who's weaker than the locally strongest group of armed men de facto doesn't have any rights at all.
I can't possibly imagine how the right to bear arms could prevent Foxconn from taking their land, as Foxconn could definitely afford to violently remove anyone resisting, no matter how much arms they could realistically have; and it would be the cost-efficient (and thus preferrable) way to solve this issue - e.g. as an alternative of offering $50000/acre for 420 acres, you can hire a lot of mercenaries with heavy hardware for half that amount and simply take the land for free.
I'm not saying it's right or good, but I am saying that America's success in the 20th century was in part due to these exact tactics used on other countries around the world. And based on history, I would say you need to stand up and fight this sort of thing because it only gets worse.