The context of the case is the war on drugs. That's the pretense for the government trying to steal his hotel, and I get the analogy. The problem is the premise. Even if everything worth trying once is worth trying twice, that doesn't do anything to prove you were right the first time, without which trying again is just compounding the error.

>Judges throw out cases on non-obvious reasoning all the time.

And is that what happened in this case? Because it seems like in this case it was "obvious" that the government was trying to take this man's hotel because it had no mortgage, they expected him to have insufficient liquid assets to successfully contest a seizure and when law enforcement seizes assets they get the resale value added to their budgets.

I can give you a far more specific principle. The only solution a government bureaucrat knows for when the first thing they tried didn't work is do the same thing, only harder.

The logic is simple: Any other proposed second solution by the bureaucrat is ipso facto proof that their first idea was bad and wrong. Therefore, this is not an acceptable proposal, since it implies they should be removed from office or should have less power. Clearly, the problem will not be solved by doing less, and it wasn't solved by doing the amount we tried the first time, so therefore, the only thing we can propose is to do the same thing, but harder.

War on drugs? Education reform? Significant swathes of foreign policy? This pattern is everywhere in government, and companies large and secure enough to be dominated by politics rather than market realities. Personally I consider it one of the root problems facing society today.