"The cause was great"...when society takes a free ride

http://www.law.columbia.edu/center_program/legal_theory/papers/spring05
(a relevant excerpt from:)
Thoughts on Equality in the American Constitution
by Guido Calabresi


"(text)......The cause was great — but on whom was the burden?
....(text)....we can see that the 14th amendment has another meaning, and that meaning is akin to the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause. It's the functional equivalent of the Takings Clause. It requires compensation. You know that the Fifth Amendment says property will not be taken for a public purpose without compensation. Compensation has two purposes. First, to compensate the person from whom the property is taken, and second, and more important, to burden those who are taking so they will decide whether taking is worthwhile or not. Compensating sounds great, but Louis Kaplow got himself tenure at Harvard by writing an article saying, “hey, if we want to take the property for a park and we know that it's a good thing, why the heck should we compensate all the people we have taken the land from when some of them are rich and don't need compensation and we could better spend the money for the poor?” A wonderful article because the left at Harvard liked it, the economists at Harvard liked it, the bananas liked it, the perfect tenure piece for any law school. But there is something to compensation despite that.

The problem is that we often don't know whether the taking is worthwhile. The point is that the less we charge those who benefit from it, the easier it is to say that we want the park. We want the park. We want the park, but is it because we don't have to pay for it? Oddly enough, the best statement of this, after Justice Jackson first said it, was by none other than Nino Scalia. In Cruzan, he asked: “are there then no reasonable and humane limits that ought not be exceeded in requiring an individual to preserve his own life? There obviously are, but they are not set forth in the due process clause.” (That is to say, where libertarian interests are not that clear, don't look to the due process clause to protect them.) “What assures us that those limits will not be exceeded is the same constitutional guarantee that is the source of most of our protection.” (And then he gives some sorts of horribles which are laughable that I'll spare you, they're about not driving and things.) “Our salvation,” he ends up saying, “is the Equal Protection Clause, which requires the democratic majority to accept for themselves and their loved ones that which they impose on you and me.” In other words, we must bear the burden, if we would put it on them."



What intriguing thoughts in this excerpt, don't ya' think?
Judge Guido Calabresi is on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was also former Dean of the Yale Law School. Compensation, as he points out above, serves two purposes, "First, to compensate the person from whom the property is taken, and second, and more important, to burden those who are taking so they will decide whether taking is worthwhile or not."

Now here's a question: when an affluent urban majority places all burden on a rural minority, without any compensatory remedy, without any shared burden, how important is the goal? The goal here being environmental conservation and sustainability? Where is the resolve, the true commitment to this goal? There isn't any.

Does the Silicon Valley elite simply "want" amenity lands because they can easily take them without having to pay for them? Is that the insidious motive behind their environmental philosophy?