Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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Nearly a year ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Kilo versus New London that privately owned property may be seized for commercial development.

The decision caused an outrage among Americans, leading some states to pass laws restricting the use of eminent domain.

Today's podcast is a phone call interview with Pacific Legal Foundation staff attorney

Timothy Sandifer who has written a book published by the Cato Institute

titled Cornerstone of Liberty Property Rights in 21st century America.

Is private property a privilege or a right?

Private property was originally believed to be a natural right of all human beings

by the American founders who based that view on

John Locke and expressed it in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution.

But what happened was beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the progressive movement

replaced that vision of property and of all rights with the idea that rights are all

just privileges that are given to you by the state for the government's own purposes

and they can revoke these rights whenever the government decides that doing so would be in the

public's interest.

The famous progressive Justice Louis Brandeis said that in the interest of the public, private private private progressive justice needs of society. You know, remolded is a wonderful euphemism for deprived and that was

the notion that the progressives brought to the law that rights are all just privileges and

so private property of course was one of those rights that has come to be seen as just a

privilege that the government can grant or deny it will.

And you think courts and legislatures have betrayed this fundamental right?

...