The Fifth Amendment used to read: "No person shall. . .be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." The Supreme Court vacated that section of Amendment Five today, in their ruling that the government has the power to seize anyone's property for any reason, as long as they can trump up some bullshit "public benefit" line of reasoning. I think David Souter's home should be first on the list to be seized. The Washington Post reports on this travesty of human rights:

The Supreme Court today effectively expanded the right of local governments to seize private property under eminent domain, ruling that people's homes and businesses -- even those not considered blighted -- can be taken against their will for private development if the seizure serves a broadly defined "public use."

In a 5-4 decision, the court upheld the ability of New London, Conn., to seize people's homes to make way for an office, residential and retail complex supporting a new $300 million research facility of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. The city had argued that the project served a public use within the meaning of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution because it would increase tax revenues, create jobs and improve the local economy.

Speaking for the majority, Justice Stevens writes:

The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including--but by no means limited to--new jobs and increased tax revenue. As with other exercises in urban planning and development,12 the City is endeavoring to coordinate a variety of commercial, residential, and recreational uses of land, with the hope that they will form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Writing for the dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Conner notes that the government now has unlimited power.

Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power. Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded--i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public--in the process.

...if predicted (or even guaranteed) positive side-effects are enough to render transfer from one private party to another constitutional, then the words "for public use" do not realistically exclude any takings, and thus do not exert any constraint on the eminent domain power.

In short, no one is safe.

Remember that nullification of property rights is one of the pillars of communism.

Karl Marx would be proud

"[The Proletariat's] mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property...

The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." -- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto