The Supreme Court has struck a blow for property rights.

SCOTUS ruled against the government in Horne v. Department of Agriculture, which I talked about in an EveryJoe column on government theft. The short of it is that a New Deal era scheme was forcing raisin growers to hand over a share of their crop to the government as part of a mandatory cartel to restrict supply and fix prices. Worse still, the government did not provide fair market value for the appropriated raisins.

On that most important question – whether or not the program falls under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which says: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation” – the court ruled 8 to 1 against the government. As Ilya Somin explains, “This is an extremely important result, because it rejects the government’s dangerous argument that the Takings Clause offers less protection for personal property than for real property (the legal term for property in land), which had been embraced by the Ninth Circuit lower court decision.”



Photo by Allison Shelley/Getty Images

On this question the Obama-appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered the lone dissent, adopting the shocking view that, “The government may condition the ability to offer goods in the market on the giving-up of certain property interests without effecting a per se taking.” In other words, because the growers might receive some tiny portion of potential sales through the government cartel (it sold some of the confiscated raisins to school lunch programs, for instance), it should not be considered a Taking and therefore not bound to meet the standard of “just compensation.”

Such a view would gut the Takings Clause and leave any American who wanted to earn a living at the mercy of politicians and government bureaucrats, who could take what they want and provide a pittance of any sales as a means to avoid Constitutional protections. No one governed in such a way could be considered free when the fruit of their labor could at any time be confiscated.

Thankfully her radical attempt to destroy property rights was roundly rejected. It does however demonstrate the eternal vigilance required to protect our basic liberties from government encroachment.

Brian Garst is an advocate for economic and individual liberty. He works as Director of Policy and Communications at the Center for Freedom & Prosperity, a free market think-tank dedicated to preserving tax competition. His writings have been published in major domestic and international papers, and he is a regular contributor for Cayman Financial Review. He also blogs at BrianGarst.com and you can find him on Twitter @BrianGarst.

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