Tuesday, February 01, 2005
 
Government Ownership Society

Your land doesn't belong to you, citizen, except at the government's leisure. Story:
    Every month for 20 years, Gentle "Jim" Day mailed his $1,222.22 mortgage payment on his business, Royal Auto Repair.

    He finally paid if off last year. But now Day, the son of Arkansas sharecroppers, faces losing his land and business.

    An agency backed by the city is preparing to take Day's business by eminent domain to make way for something called a "Media Box."
A development group gets to take a commercial business owned by a private citizen for a mostly TBA addition to the "arts district."

I don't know about you, but I always suspect that government officials love these underused and underserving "arts districts" as personal come-ons to easy living and easy loving artists and wealthy, divorced or surviving spouse patrons of those arts. Arts districts don't tend to serve the entire community, contrary the Utopian wishes of their proponents. Arts districts serve the upper crusts of society who go to the theatre, the symphony, or the opera. Sorry, but save for school field trips, that doesn't tend to include the majority of Americans.

So now the city of St. Louis will forcibly seize the land of a working man to make something for the benefit of the well-to-do. Typical.

On a final note, I must include that this is a triumph for the Democrats who run St. Louis. I thought the Republicans were supposed to look and act like Mr. Moneybags from Monopoly Chance cards. I guess it's just whoever's in power.


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:04 AM
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