The Unintended Consequences of Land Use Controls

There's a good op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this week that would be funny--if it weren't so maddeningly true. Roger Kimball writes about his struggles with local land use agencies and FEMA in trying to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy:

In "The Road to Serfdom," Friedrich Hayek noted that "the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work." 

And how. But what makes the phenomenon so insidious is that many of the functionaries are as friendly as can be. It's just that they're cogs in a machine whose overriding purpose is not service but self-perpetuation and control. 

It is, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw, a recipe for a form of despotism peculiar to modern democracies. It does this, wrote Tocqueville, by enforcing "a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules" that reduces citizens "to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd." The sobering thought is that we're all complicit in that infantilization. After all, we keep voting for the politicians who put this leviathan in place.

My friends who read Austrian economics are probably thinking Kimball sounds a lot like Frédéric Bastiat:

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

Why should it be so tough to rebuild after a natural disaster? The seen and the unseen, indeed.

New Institute in Florida Pledges to Protect Property Rights

The Pacific Legal Foundation has created the Wade L. Hopping Institute for Private Property Rights. The Institute will fight to protect property rights through education and litigation. It will work, in part, through a network of pro bono attorneys to fight government abuse of property rights. It's a fitting tribute to Justice Hopping, with whom I had the privilege of working for at the firm he founded, Hopping Green & Sams.


The Institute already has environmental journalists and nonprofits worried. Their hand-wringing shows how much the Foundation's work is needed. Private property rights are about "individual autonomy and the enjoyment of liberty." But for folks like Monica Reimer of Earthjustice, private property rights can be reduced to nuisance claims. Ms. Reimer believes that growth management and environmental laws "were all intended to protect private property rights." Really? Those laws may have been intended, ostensibly, to protect the public health and safety. They may have intended to recognize "public environmental rights." Yet they have never been said to have been intended, first and foremost, to protect private property rights.


It's a testament to American's support for free enterprise that even environmentalists have hijacked the rhetoric of property rights advocates.

Why Free Enterprise Needs a Story

Last month, Arthur C. Brooks wrote an insightful article on the new culture war. Brooks believes the new culture war in America is not about the social struggles of the last two decades--"guns, gays or abortion." The new culture war is about competing visions for America's future. Will the country return to its free enterprise, capitalist roots? Or will it continue the drift to social democracy, to statism? This question should concern every American, not just those of us who are economy-first voters. The answer will touch every aspect of our lives. Consider that, in recent years, the pace of change has quickened, with quasi-nationalized health care, financial bailouts, and government-owned car manufacturers.

Despite these changes, Americans still overwhelming support free enterprise. Brooks points to a Gallup poll describing how Americans feel about various terms describing the political economy. 86% of those polled felt positively about "free enterprise," and 61% felt positively about "capitalism." He also points to a Pew Research Study reporting that 70% of Americans believe that, generally, people are better off in a free-market economy.

Yet, if these studies are accurate, why have even liberals been wondering if we are drifting towards social democracy? To me, the problem is clear: free enterprise needs a story.

Marxists, communists, and socialists have the clear advantage here, as they can easily blend elements of ideology, mythology, and even spirituality. We've all heard the ridiculous stories about Kim Jong Il. More seriously, much scholarship has discussed the Soviet mythologies, and the Chinese are still taught glorified stories of the communist party's early days.

A principled, perhaps even moral, approach is the first step, as Brooks suggests: supporters of free enterprise "must come together around core principles: that the purpose of free enterprise is human flourishing, not materialism; that we stand for equality of opportunity, not equality of income; that we seek to stimulate true prosperity rather than simply treat poverty; and that we believe in principle over power."

But the problem has never been that free enterprise and capitalism lacked proponents with a principled personal philosophy. People need stories and myth precisely because they illustrate those principles. President Obama is a master of illustrating his personal philosophy with semi-mythical American characters. Those of us who believe in free enterprise need to begin doing the same. At the very least, we need to make our beliefs more accessible because many Americans are economically illiterate.

Russ Roberts pushes in the right direction in today's Wall Street Journal, "[Friedrich] Hayek understood that the opposite of top-down collectivism was not selfishness and egotism. A free modern society is all about cooperation. We join with others to produce the goods and services we enjoy, all without top-down direction. The same is true in every sphere of activity that makes life meaningful--when we sang and when we dance, when we play and when we pray. Leaving us free to join with others as we see fit--in our work and in our play-is the road to true and lasting prosperity."

That's at least a start.