A school security officer at a health care town hall forum in Reston, Va., didn't like the image of Barack Obama on a protester's sign. So he ordered that the sign be put down, under threat of arrest.

Arrest? For what? For having a caricature of the president?

"This used to be America!" the protester said.

"It ain't no more, OK?" the officer said.

The officer, as wrong as he seems, may be right.

It may not be America anymore.

Consider: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper reported this week that Atlanta mayoral candidate Lisa Borders said "she'll use eminent domain powers to take land from owners who poorly maintain their property."

"We need to take it from them," she said.

Even in a city with blighted areas, that's a little frightening.

It's a sentiment that, sadly enough, is rife today in America -- that the government should up and take your property if it decides it doesn't like what you're doing with it.

Or if the government can make money off it: In the infamous Kelo case of 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court outrageously ruled that a local government could take someone's home forcibly if it found a developer that could make money off the land. (Georgia's legislature has since outlawed the practice.)

Today, Susette Kelo's New London, Conn., home is gone -- replaced by an empty lot and empty promises of grand developments and tax revenues.

But even if the development had occurred, officials would have stepped over Americans' rights to private property to get there.

We're the first to see the need to clean up blighted areas. Augusta's city government, for instance, is far too sanguine about the city's blight and lack of code enforcement. But fines and liens and code enforcement actions are the way to go, not government confiscation of property from private owners.

Yes, it takes longer to work through such processes. But no one ever said a democracy or republic was easy or efficient. Just the best and most just.

This is why Sir Winston Churchill said, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried."