It was not intended to mark the symbolic elevation the interest of Rolls Royce to the level of the State of Virginia, and the United States. But whether intended or not, flags are symbols of power and the juxtaposition of these flags is
symbolic, whether the people who put them up intended it or not. Virginians are about to vote on a constitutional amendment that would prohibit takings for “economic development” and require compensation for impairment of access, as well as for lost profits, and this picture was used recently to accompany an article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, opposing the amendments.
So in a desperate effort to prevent passage, local condemnors are predicting the end of the world as we know it because, don’t you see, it’ll be just too expensive to create any public projects in Virginia and the state will go to
hell in a handbasket, and there will be no more German-owned Rolls Royce plants in the Old Dominion. Or worse, Rolls Royce may have to pay the full cost of doing business. Oh, the horror of it!
We could go on on this subject for a while, but it is sufficient, it seems to us, to ask this question: if taking private property will be too expensive for condemnors under the new system, then why isn’t it too expensive to property
owners under current system, when they have to bear those losses inflicted on them when their land is taken by eminent domain, but without compensation for these losses? After all, the state benefits from such projects, it has more resources, and is better situated to spread the cost of those projects on the population that benefits from them. As Justice Holmes once put it: the public is entitled only to that for which it has paid. So shouldn’t the parties who
benefit from a public project bear the burden fairly, instead of dumping it on the victims who lose their land by eminent domain but are undercompensated? Far be it from us to mouth the “soak the rich” redistributionist twaddle, but even so, it is obscene for the makers of the most expensive car in the world to get subsidized on the backs of people whose land is taken to build their six-figure cars.