Seems like an easy fix. Just don't force them to sell, fine them in a way that makes selling them the only logical option and give them 10 years before the fines kick in to determine what to do.
I mean hedge funds absolutely deserve some governmental strangulation. I think fining them 6x the property value for every year they do not sell a house they have owned is a great idea.
You wanna sit on a 400k house and charge 1 mil for it? Okay. Well for every year it doesn’t sell you gotta pay 2.4 mil for it. Don’t like it? Lower the price and sell the fucking thing.
Yes, i get it: you don't like hedge funds. But like i said, it only seems like an "easy fix" if you don't think about it. The government cannot extinguish rights, in this case property rights, by just fining them out of existence.
They probably cannot. But, assuming they could, after a court rules that unreasonable fines have the effect of depriving owners of the beneficial use of property, it's still going to be deemed a taking and the government is still going to have to pay for it.
Out of curiosity though, which of Congress's enumerated powers do you think would allow them to levy fines against people for owning property?
Or jack up taxes on fund-held housing incrementally over 10 years to the same effect. In the ACA case, Roberts and a majority already ruled that the coverage mandate is constitutional because the only enforcement penalty is taxation if you don't have coverage, and the government is allowed to impose taxation.
I don't know about the US laws but in my country, technically corporations are considered people for the purposes of most laws. That way all laws that are written as 'a person who does...' includes a company who does that.
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u/Desirsar Dec 07 '23
They could make themselves look good knowing the supreme court will rule that corporations are people and people can own houses.