Politics & Power Quote by Michael Kinsley

Kinsley is doing what he does best: taking a legal shibboleth and rubbing it against common sense until it sparks. The opening move - "Almost any government activity" - is deliberately provocative, a little impish. He’s widening the Takings Clause to the point of absurdity to expose a modern American habit: treating every public burden as a personal expropriation. If you can describe taxes, zoning, environmental rules, or even a new bike lane as "taking property", then "taking" stops being a constitutional category and becomes a political mood.

The punchline is his "basic model": the government tossing you out of your house. That’s not just a vivid example; it’s a rhetorical stake in the ground. Kinsley is reminding readers that the constitutional idea of a taking was built around a blunt, physical seizure - the state wants your land, it pays. By anchoring the concept in the most concrete scenario imaginable, he’s mocking the contemporary urge to stretch the doctrine to cover everything from lost profits to diminished views.

The subtext is skeptical, almost libertarian in its impatience with grievance inflation, but not anti-government. It’s a warning about how rights talk gets gamed: once every regulation is framed as theft, democracy becomes a courtroom drama where the loudest plaintiff wins. In the late-20th-century backdrop of deregulation politics and property-rights activism, Kinsley’s line reads like a prophylactic against a legal theory turning into a cultural reflex.