For years, the site of the property condemned in the controversial Kelo v. City of New London case has stood empty. Now however, there are recent reports that the city of New London has found a developer interested in building townhouses on the site (see here andhere) [HT: my RA Eva Choi, and Michael O’Malley of the Yale University Press].

Several previous plans to develop on the condemned property have gone under. In November, the Pfizer Corporation, whose lobbying helped instigate the initial takings, announced the planned closing of its headquarters in New London. That step further reduced the likelihood that anything will be built in the area. It remains to be soon whether the townhouse development will work out better than these previous efforts. At present, it is not clear how much the new project will cost taxpayers, and a news report indicates that “[c]onstruction on the project will not occur any time soon.”

Even if the townhouses are eventually built, it is unlikely that they will generate enough development to offset the value of the numerous homes and businesses wiped out by the condemnations, the opportunity cost of having the area lie empty for years, and the over $80 million in public funds already expended on the project.

Ironically, much of the condemned area was a lower-middle class residential neighborhood before the takings, and New London’s current plan is to use the land for roughly the same purpose. The City could have “achieved” this result at far lower cost simply by leaving the neighborhood alone in the first place. Taken as a whole, the Kelo story exemplifies the ways in which “economic development” takings not only victimize property owners, but also often destroy more development than they create (see also my more extended discussion inthis article, which cites figures for the costs of the Kelo takings).

Ilya has added an update worth checking out. Me linky. You clicky.

You remember that “Constitution” thingy? You know, the anachronism from a bygone era, which Democrat politicians and judges take an oath to uphold and then promptly forget about — or claim that it’s a “living and breathing” document?

To show you how far left the Democrat Party has moved over the last couple of decades, a serious debate appears to be raging within the party over the role of the United States Senate. Not just procedures like the filibuster, mind you, but whether there actually should be a Senate at all.

Go read the whole thing [including an excellent brief history lesson on why we have checks and balances].

I am reminded once again how few people realize that we do not live in a democracy; we live in a consitutional republic. Given how the populace at large thinks, while I am certainly not in love with how our republic is functioning, moving toward more “democracy” would obviously be worse.

Mob rule.

Why do I get the feeling that precious few have read the Federalist Papers?

Islam or death

I read Le Roy Barnett’s letter (“Muslims, speak up,” June 26) about Muslims’ opinion on Abdul Rahman’s conversion to Christianity.

Islam is not only a religion, it is a complete way of life. Islam guides Muslims from birth to grave. The Quran and prophet Muhammad’s words and practical application of Quran in life cannot be changed.

Islam is a guide for humanity, for all times, until the day of judgment. It is forbidden in Islam to convert to any other religion. The penalty is death. There is no disagreement about it.

Islam is being embraced by people of other faiths all the time. They should know they can embrace Islam, but cannot get out. This rule is not made by Muslims; it is the supreme law of God.

Please do not ask us Muslims to pick some rules and disregard other rules. Muslims are supposed to embrace Islam in its totality.

Nazra Quraishi
East Lansing

Hat Tip: LGF

I give you this excerpt not as a good representation of the peice as a whole, but becasue this is one aspect that is particulaly poignent for me right now.  All the more reason to go read the whole thing.

Finally, we are witnessing a larger existential war, in which Iraq is the central, but not the only, theater. Put simply: will the spreading affluence and liberality of Westernization undermine the 8th-century mentality of the Islamists more quickly than their terrorists, armed with Western weapons, prey on the ennui of a postmodern Europe and America — with our large gullible populations that either don’t believe we are in a real war, or think that we should not be?

Americans know exactly the creed of the Islamists and what they have in store for us nonbelievers. Yet if we are not infidels, can we at least be fideles? That is, can we any longer articulate what we believe in, and whether it is worth defending?

The problem is not that the majority of Americans have voiced doubts about the future of Iraq — arguments over self-interest and values happen in every long war when the battlefield does not daily bring back good news.

Instead, the worry is that too many have misdirected their anger at the very culture that produced and nourished them. [...]

Emphasis mine.

The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, widely presented as the beginning of the efforts towards a European Union and commemorated in “Europe Day,” contains phrases which state that it is “a first step in the federation of Europe”, and that “this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation”. As critics of the EU have noted, these political objectives are usually omitted when the Declaration is referred to, and most people do not even know of their existence. A federation is of course a State and “yet for decades now the champions of EC/EU integration have been swearing blind that they have no knowledge of any such plans. EEC/EC/EU has steadily acquired ever more features of a supranational Federation: flag, anthem, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, laws.” The EU founders “were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it.” Booker and North calls the European Union “a slow-motion coup d’état: the most spectacular coup d’état in history,” designed to gradually and carefully sideline the democratic process and subdue the older nation states of Europe without saying so in public.

In 2005, an unprecedented joint declaration by the leaders of all British political groups in Brussels called for PM Tony Blair to push for an end the “medieval” practice of European legislation being decided behind closed doors. Critics claim that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s supreme law-making body, which decides two thirds of all Britain’s laws (and the majority of laws in all Western European countries), “is the only legislature outside the Communist dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba to pass laws in secret.” As one of the signers put it: “We still have this medieval way of making decisions in the EU; people hide behind other member states, and blame them. It increases people’s sense of cynicism, but what we need is some straight talking.” According to British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan, this is how the EU was designed. “Its founding fathers understood from the first that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never succeed if each successive transfer of power had to be referred back to the voters for approval. So they cunningly devised a structure where supreme power was in the hands of appointed functionaries, immune to public opinion.” “Indeed, the EU’s structure is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic.”

But be sure to read the whole thing.

UPDATE: this is good news:

Many adults in the Netherlands hold strong views on the way Muslims adapt to the European continent, according to a poll by Motivaction released by GPD. 63 per cent of respondents believe think Islam is incompatible with modern European life.

And they would be correct. And god help us all if modern European life is altered to accomodate Islam in its current form.

[...] It needs to be said at the outset that no government in the U.S., not even Detroit’s, has ever imposed the kind of crushing regulations that the Indian government imposed during the height of the notorious License Raj in the mid-’50s. Key industries—steel, telecommunications, airlines—were nationalized, but even more harmful was the Kafkaesque web of regulations that the remaining private businesses had to endure in the name of ensuring a “rational allocation of resources.”

Every move of private industry, big or small, was subject to licensing. Forget setting up a new plant or a factory. If an enterprise wanted to buy or import equipment, change its product mix, or even produce more than its allotted quota for a product, it had to first obtain permission from the Directorate General of Technical Development, a process that could take years and a small fortune in bribes, points out Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound and former CEO of Procter & Gamble, India. “Large business houses set up parallel bureaucracies in Delhi to follow up on files, organize bribes, and win licenses,” he recalls.

Confronted with a massive fiscal crisis and the prospect of defaulting on its international debt obligations, the Indian government dismantled much of this ridiculous licensing regime in 1991. In a bid to boost exports to replenish the country’s empty foreign exchange reserves, it also eliminated all import licensing and slashed tariffs on capital goods. Both were relics of India’s import-substitution days, when manufacturers were discouraged from buying equipment from abroad in order to build the domestic industry. This jacked up production costs and made the country’s exports hopelessly uncompetitive.

Trade liberalization was a boon for the I.T. industry, which already had escaped many of the stultifying controls that other industries faced simply because the architects of India’s industrial policy had failed to anticipate its birth. [...]

read the rest on your own.

The Only Republican in San Francisco has some first hand details:

“I just got back and it went well. We had 70-80 people, among them a Danish journalism student from Berkeley, many flags, a hottie handing out Havarti and a complete absence of local media.”

Let’s hope we see more events like this. I found out about it too late to make it over there, but I’d love to get to the next one…

Interesting to see that T.O.R.I.S.F. poses the following question in the header area of his blog: “Imagine being an empirical, free-market thinker in a liberal town.”

Hmmmmmmmm… Gee, I wonder what that WOULD be like?

Personal to TORISF: let’s talk.

Hat tip: Little Green Footballs.

I don’t know about you, but seeing this picture makes me want to go out and by some Danish products.