The near-unanimous Supreme Court decided today in favor of the farmers whose raisins the federal government wanted to take as part of a cockamamie New Deal-era regulatory scheme. The Court ruled 8-1 in support of Cato’s position that taking personal property is a compensable action, regardless of whether the government purports to act on the property owner’s behalf, and 5-4 on the question of compensation for that taking. (This is two years after the Court ruled 9-0 that the Marvin and Laura Horne could have their day in court and raise their constitutional challenge, rather than being stuck in some byzantine administrative purgatory.)
Of course, it should be rather obvious that when the government takes your property, its actions are subject to the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, which requires that such taking be (a) for a “public use” and (b) subject to the owner receiving “just compensation.” And it should be equally obvious that the Constitution doesn’t distinguish between real property (your house) and personal property (your car). Yet the government insisted here that, at least in the context of agricultural-marketing/price-setting programs, it can take your crops and do whatever it likes with them so long as it’s all hypothetically for your own benefit.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/government-has-pay-raisins-it-confiscates
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