“The individual’s ability to decide for himself how to use specific things, being guided by his own knowledge and expectations as well as by those of whatever group he might join, depends on general recognition of a respected private domain of which the individual is free to dispose, and an equally recognized way in which the right to particular things can be transferred from one person to another. The prerequisite for the existence of such property, freedom, and order, from the time of the Greeks to the present, is the same: law in the sense of abstract rules enabling any individual to ascertain at any time who is entitled to dispose over any particular thing.” F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 1988.
Elbert County’s Current Master Plan Vision Statement:
Elbert county schools have significantly lower CSAP scores than Douglas County schools. Elbert County has no “diverse employment opportunities.” Elbert County has no reasonable levels of “recreation, commerce, and industry” to balance. Development does not pay its own way. Individual property rights are subordinate to the intentions of county planners. Commerce and industry are not encouraged. Take home pay in Elbert County is lower here than in surrounding counties, and commuting expenses are substantially higher.
By most measures, the original Elbert County Master Plan has totally failed. The magnitude of this failure provides no hope whatsoever that future planning efforts will succeed where this one has not. It is time Elbert County cut loose the albatross of managed growth and planning regulation. These fatal conceits have cost us the future they promised.
“Hume noticed clearly. . .how the maximum freedom of all requires equal restraints on the freedom of each through what he called the three ‘fundamental laws of nature’: ‘the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises’.” ibid.
Regulatory planning substantially impedes all 3 of Hume’s fundamental laws of nature.
