"Poletown" -- How Government Robs the Poor and Gives to the Rich- by John Crouch

"Poletown" -- How Government Robs the Poor and Gives to the Rich

By John Crouch, Attorney at Law, Crouch & Crouch, Arlington, Virginia; (703) 528-6700;
Other Crouch Articles

Published in 1991 in the Brown Daily Herald , Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (U.S.)

Note -- I have recently heard that a few years after this column was published, GM actually did build the plant.

This was a reply to a column about the Poletown situation by my classmate Thad Williamson, so it does not recite all the underlying facts, as the readers had just gotten them from Thad's column.

I share Thad Williamson's fury [op-ed page, March 19, 1991] at GM's destruction of Poletown, Michigan, but it seems glaringly obvious to me that Detroit's people are being ravaged by too much government, not by market forces. Furthermore, Poletown is the rule, not the exception.

I see no evidence of a free market at work in the Poletown affair, in which a local government seized an entire neighborhood through "eminent domain" to give to GM to build a plant. The neighborhood was razed, but then GM pulled out and the plant was not built.

What happened to Poletown could happen to anyone. The power of eminent domain, like the municipal power to seize the land of those who cannot pay their property taxes, means that Americans ultimately do not own their own homes: they hold them only while they have a certain income, and as long as the government cannot think of a more visionary use for the land. If forced to sell, they must accept what a judge calls a fair price. (If governments actually offered a fair market price, they would practically never have to use eminent domain).

As the Poletown case demonstrates, eminent domain's purported restriction to state purposes relies on a distinction which in practice is seldom objectively made. The Poletown story is an old one, and is continually being reenacted. Ever since King James chartered the Virginia Company, American governments have declined to draw a clear line between public and private business. All ventures, from hotdog carts to turnpikes and factories, have to justify and advertise themselves as panaceas which will enrich local people and their governments, who in turn reward them with privileges or subsidies in the public interest. As long as they have the legal or financial power, politicians will grant these favors and plunder people with small, fixed capital in hopes of luring larger, more mobile wealth. This feudal mercantilist system poses no foreseeable danger of a net wealth redistribution from richer to poorer. Those who worry that the poor are demoralized by getting something for nothing should direct their concern closer to home.