Insane American laws: The government stealing your proprty

The United States is the pinnacle and epitome of freedom and free-market capitalism, where private ownership of property is sacrosanct, and heavily protected by the Constitution and multitudes of laws...

except when the government can just steal your property, just like that, just like it were a full-on Communist government. And you have absolutely no recourse against it.

A civil engineer purchases a piece of land from a small town in South Caroline. He does everything by the book, conforms to all laws, and even consults with all authorities in the town to get all papers and permits, and everything strictly by the book. He now owns that piece of land.

The problem? The nearby townspeople don't want him to own that land nor build anything on it, so they complain and complain and complain to the town council. Said council ends up agreeing with them.

But what can they do? The guy legally owns that land. There's nothing they can legally do to stop him from building anything he wants, within code.

Except there is something they can do: Just steal his land using the obscure "eminent domain rights" statutes.

These statutes exist so that the government can build essential infrastructure for public benefit, such as a highway, a bridge, or essential utilities, or the like, particularly if avoiding that specific land would make it impossible, highly inconvenient, or overly expensive (such as having to make a huge detour for a major highway just to avoid a small plot of land.)

So what excuse could the use to steal the guy's property using those statutes? Were they going to build a highway through it? Nope. Utilities? Nope. Some other governmental building? Nope.

But there's one thing they could steal the land for: To build a public park.

Not that the town had any money in their budget to build a park. Or any plans for one. The town leadership literally came up with the "public park" on the fly at that moment... without any intent to build anything on that plot of land. For the sole reason of being able to legally steal the guy's property and stop him from building anything there.

So the guy lost his property, being stolen from him by the town, which has zero plans to use that land for anything or build anything there. The town stole the land using a contrived legal loophole.

And this is completely legal in the United States. The promised land of freedom and capitalism, where private property is sacrosanct.

You can see a video about this here.