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Another very simple solution to the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the confiscation
of private homes.
Some of the states passed laws stating that any land a municipality sells has to be sold at auction to the highest bidder.
I think another law which was used was that any land sold by the local government had be sold by a lottery system. However, I can't recall the details about how that one worked. Both of these were used to great success at first.*
That way crooked city officials could not sell any land that they confiscated to a specific person (who was paying them off). As you can probably realize, this law was good for a lot of reasons. Selling land has always been one of the biggest causes of corruption among government officials. Probably only exceeded by 'donations'.
*These laws were used mainly in pre revolutionary war times when we were still colonies. I think I recall at least part of it. The first law did not work very well because the police would keep anyone else from bidding high on the property. Then the states made them use a lottery system and sealed bids but I cant recall how that worked.
After awhile the second law did not work very well either. These two laws became obsolete by the time of the Continental Congress when other methods were found to work much better.
I think with television and our free press these laws would work really well. Back then if you made your feelings known about the city confiscating property then your property got confiscated next. So the city shut people up real fast.
They would have a real hard time doing that today though. The tactics available to the cities would not shut anyone up. They would just make people scream louder.
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