“When the Texas Rangers [professional baseball] opportunity came along [1989], Bush was a man of modest wealth….Young Bush got on the telephone and raised money from truly wealthy investors to buy the team. He bought a two-percent stake for $600,000 using borrowed money….
“One of the first moves was to threaten to move the Rangers out of Arlington….The tactic worked. Bush and his allies arranged for a special referendum, held in January. Arlington voters were asked to approve a half-cent increase in the sales tax….
“The Bush investor group hired professional campaign consultants — Democrats — to manage the election. The opposition, predictably, objected to higher taxes. More than that, they protested that it was just not right for people rich enough to finance their own stadium to force others to buy it for them. The campaign pros, with $130,000 to spend, easily rolled over the barely organized local opposition in the special referendum….
Yeah, tax incentives for mobile businesses is a long-term issue, see, e.g., http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=236714
Although, many conservative commentators argue nothing should be done about tax competition for business, because the competition among political jurisdictions decreases taxes overall. Yet while it does lower taxes on mobile capital, it does nothing for immobile property interests.
That being said, the comparison with Naboth’s vineyard isn’t right at all — family land was not alienable in Israel for divine reasons. So the principle doesn’t apply to other times and nations.
I guess the analogy is:
There is a rule in American culture which ordinarily prohibits private people from taking private property
Bush claims to be someone who honors that rule (part of that covenant)
Bush violates that rule by adopting the view of another school of thought (stadiums can be “public use”)
I understand the formalistic objection to taking private property an assigning ownership to another private agent. And it has some merit.
Still, even the linked article does not say that “private people” took private property in this case. The city government took the property. At the instigation of private individuals, to be sure, but that’s not a problem in itself. (If the city agrees to build a road in a new subdivision, then it may have to take private property at the instigation of a private party. So surely the rule can’t be that governments have to ignore requests from private parties.)
And while I am sympathetic to the dissenting view on “public use” as articulated in Kelo, nonetheless, why does “taking private property for public use” necessarily rule out this sort of reasoning on the part of the city magistrate: retaining the stadium will generate employment and tax revenues for the people of the city.
In that case, the “public use” is not that everyone living in the city will go to the stadium, but rather that they all are able to enjoy better roads, schools, and parks at a lower level of taxation than they would have without the stadium. So it is taking private property for public use.
This sounds like the way things are done here in the Soviet of Washington.