Correct. It's also not just about the money, it also takes a lot of time and adds a large amount of uncertainty to a project. Not every owner is willing to comply, causing an entire route to have to be reconsidered, which takes a lot of time. Eminent domain is pretty much never used, because judges (in my country) will pretty much always side with the property owner, unless the utility can proof that there's really no other way (which they almost never can).
So on a 10km+ route with hundreds of properties, multiple municipalities or other public organizations and other utilities, this gets really complicated really quickly.
Here’s a story from this week where a gas company took land from a forest to build a pipeline that the previous and current landowners had no interest in selling to the gas company.
I'm not in the US, hence me explicitly writing 'in my country', because I'm aware that more countries exist and that things aren't the same everywhere.
While Kelo was IMO a bad decision, it's also not the case that eminent domain is routinely exercised at low cost and effort in the US. Private property owners routinely block many types of development on their land and adjoining land. People like to decry NIMBYism all the time. I suspect building an interstate highway system in the US today would be effectively impossible.
ADDED: And, in general, exercising eminent domain should be hard. One can simultaneously believe it should exist and have a lot of safeguards against exercising it.
Eminent domain for a public road is one thing. Forcibly taking land for a private company to make profits on is entirely different and not comparable. That is the part I object to the most.
> I suspect building an interstate highway system in the US today would be effectively impossible.
The government should be able to take whatever land it needs for a highway, railway, etc. When we're talking about public infrastructure, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one landowner.
Perhaps the reward isn't enough if it is that difficult to get permission. Landowners near me compete for cell tower leases because it is absolutely worth it. I suspect profit sharing on the electricity sold through the line would grease the wheels a bit.
Perhaps landowners have unreasonable negotiating leverage when a small number who have little to gain or lose can stop a project that is worth billions to society as a whole.
If you need to get permission of thousands of people, and any single one can hold up the entire endeavor, then the economically rational thing to do is to be the last holdout, as you will get paid a lot more. Everybody loses in that scenario except the holdout.
In the US, class action lawsuits allow multiple entities to be rolled into a class to sue another party. Is there an equivalent in the other direction (i.e., could a utility company roll everyone into class)? I see lots of possible problems (i.e., class participation allows opt-out).
The dynamic of class action lawsuits isn't about the quantity of class members, but rather that they're unenumerable. As such they don't really make sense to apply to defendants, and would have terrible results if they were.
A plain old suit with many enumerated defendants would work for this topic though, assuming there was a cause of action.
That is exactly my point. Everyone gains massively except the poor guy who has to live with the problem. You don't see something terribly wrong with dumping your problems on random people just because they happen to live out of your sight? If society gains billions then surely you can spare some percentage of that gain to lift up the rural areas and people. Instead the coasts look at us like rubes and treat us with distain while we feed them and get our land forcibly taken. It seems like such an attitude would eventually cause a political rift in such a society.
Power companies have done this in the past; there still exist farms that have perpetual free power from an agreement back in the rural electrification days; we get a right-of-way for the power lines, you get free power.
It's often much easier for the power companies to just negotiate with the city/state to use the already existing road right of ways, even if that's longer.
Is it really not good for society to allow high prices? A high price on electricity would lead to consideration of alternate solutions, such as just not doing the thing which requires it or local power generation. The problem we have is that negative externalities aren't priced into fossil fuel alternatives
An advantage of increased awkwardness in dealing with local landowners would be that local organisations are incentivised to arrange a solution voluntarily, strengthening the local community, such as community owned and administered infrastructure that was constructed without government having to use eminent domain
I don't have any resources to share but in my country the bank looks at my income - expenses then checks if I've defaulted on any debts. My limited understanding of the US system is that everyone has (often several) credit cards to build the necessary credit score. Here owning a credit card is for people drowning in debt who struggle to pay bills on time or in rare cases new money flexing their amex black, which is also shunned upon.
I've always thought the US system was super weird and backwards forcing debt on people. We don't have credit cards from every big chain and don't get harassed into signing up for cards in the mall, it's just not a thing.
We have the same safeguards you have, but we prove it with sensible spending instead of getting debt just to prove that we can pay it in time.
"looks at my income - expenses then checks if I've defaulted on any debts" - This is basically what we do in the US as well. But HOW do they do this in your country?
In the US, the loan originators look at year-end tax forms or recent pay stubs to verify income. They look at credit reports from e.g. Experian to verify defaults and other debt information.
The paychecks are verified at the bank, probably tax as well. For the debts we have a government authority which is usually the last resort for creditors. This authority also takes care of getting your cash, selling belongings etc to pay off creditors.
This is all open data and can be verified with just a phone call to the tax office and debt authority. Some private aggregators exist for convenience but they're regulated in what they're allowed to share and for how long.
The private companies are also required to notify me anytime someone checks my score, the government agencies aren't.
Can gaming companies stop bots and RMT within their games?