Please note: I searched for related topics but was unable to find any. I apologize if a similar thing has been posted. I also apologize if this
is in the incorrect forum. I attempted to find a more suitable forum and was unable to, so I posted it here.
Recently it has occurred to me that the United States is not a particularly free country. For this post I'd like to focus mainly on property
ownership and also eminent domain, which relates to property ownership.
Property ownership is a pretty big thing in America. We're proud of the fact that we can possess our own property. Once you pay off the bank
loan and the ownership is fully transferred into your name, it's yours. You own it. But is that ownership really worth anything? You still have to
pay property taxes, which is essentially a rent on your own property. If you stop paying property taxes, you get fined. Eventually, the government
will take the property from you.
How is that ownership? If it's yours, that means it's yours to do what you want with. You shouldn't have to keep paying the government to let you
use it. I'll follow up on this momentarily with eminent domain but first...
...I should interject here that I am not necessarily opposed to all taxes. The country probably needs certain reasonable taxes to continue
functioning. But I digress...
Eminent domain is defined by Wikipedia as "the power of the state to appropriate private property for its own use without the owner's
consent." Traditionally it has been used for such things as roads, city parks, baseball stadiums and other things the government deems "for the
public good" (although I'd say roads are the only things in the above that are really for the public good) and has been often used when property
owners don't want to give up their property, regardless of the money being offered to them.
More recently, however, it was ruled that property can be taken if the government thinks it can be better used by someone who will have a greater
chance of giving them a higher tax profit. That is... unbelievable. I don't have any other words for it. I actually just read an article on a
similar case a few minutes ago, which prompted me to write this. In this case, the land was actually seized before this new ruling - it was going to
be used to construct a public building but now that the government owns it they decided to sell it back to another business. One that makes campaign
contributions to the city leaders. Here's the
article.
So now we're back to where we were above. If the government can decide on a whim that they're going to take your property and give it to someone
else, then it's not yours. It's their property and they're renting it to you. So they need to stop pretending it's ownership or start acting
like everyone else. If they want to build a road through my property and I don't want them to, there's nothing they can do. They can make an offer
and if I refuse, they walk away and can't do a damn thing other than build the road around it. If it's any other way, then it's not ownership and
we are not free, and it's as simple as that.
I pray that I am so very wrong
on this to! 
I payed $98,000 for this place 35 years ago. They say it is now worth $500,000+ on the open
market. To bad with land being what it is now. $500,000 might get you a small lot someplace. 
