Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Kinsley

The knife twist here is how casually Kinsley exposes a moral loophole hiding inside legal jargon. He sets up an outrage everyone can agree on: the state can’t confiscate your home to reward raw corruption, “the mayor’s mistress,” even with compensation. That image is deliberately tacky and intimate, the kind of backroom sleaze Americans like to believe the Constitution was built to prevent. Then comes the pivot: “But they can, apparently...” The sarcasm isn’t decorative; it’s an accusation that the system has learned to launder the same abuse through respectable language.

Kinsley is writing in the shadow of modern eminent domain fights, especially the logic that “public use” can be stretched into “public benefit” and then into “whatever raises the tax base.” His list - “trendy shops and restaurants, a hotel and so on” - is not neutral urban planning. It’s a class signal. It conjures a familiar redevelopment aesthetic: upscale retail, tourist-friendly spaces, the kind of “revitalization” that reads, to displaced homeowners, as a takeover with better branding.

The subtext is that corruption has evolved. Instead of a mayor’s mistress, you get a public-private partnership; instead of a bribe, a feasibility study; instead of theft, a check. Compensation doesn’t cleanse the coercion, Kinsley implies, because the real injury is the forced conversion of a home into a commodity for someone else’s vision. The line lands because it frames the debate as an ethics test, not a zoning dispute: if the outcome feels indistinguishable from graft, the legal distinction starts to look like a con.