Liberty Is Worth the Abuse

Daily Article | Posted on 5/29/2008 by Gary Galles

We get a lot of abuse, those of us who publicly defend private property rights and voluntary arrangements against the varied depredations of government. Having to constantly face such attacks is a substantial part of the cost of speaking out, and probably explains why more people don’t take the risk.

For those who might be considering publicly taking up the cause of “life, liberty, and property,” I offer the following example to give you a taste of what you can expect. [Read more…]

An Abe21 unsigned opinion, collected 5/21/08, since taken down.

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“The Will of the People[?]”
“What the Citizens want[?]”
“The Collective Persona of the county[?]”

Balderdash! Buncombe! BS!

There is no such thing, entity, common idea, or consensus. The Master Plan is advisory to the Commission precisely because no fictional collective consciousness, however loudly proclaimed by a vocal minority, should ever be binding upon citizens. I don’t care how many consultants and government planners put their expensive hours into writing it, the county Master Plan is not the product of a representative legislature or representative deliberative body. The county Master Plan is the work product of a minority of non-representative, special-interest, squeaky-wheels, who cloak their totalitarian methods in social engineering platitudes, and who use the courts to accomplish what they cannot obtain at the ballot box.

Any judge who upholds their minority plan as binding upon the majority should be run out of town on a rail. No quantity of speculative judicial reasoning can disguise the injustice of holding the majority hostage to the utopian dreams of a special interest minority.

Mr. Thomasson and Democrats of like mind in this, as much as I think the county commission needs diversity, it is issues like this involving the usurpation of fundamental liberties that will lead to the election of a Republican ticket in November.

I encourage the Democrats to propose their utopian visions for voluntary democratic approval at the ballot box, however, forceful impositions of social engineering upon the citizens of Elbert County should be resisted with equal force. Citizens can and will protect their own interests far more effectively than planners ever have or will, and that is the “no-brainer.”
Brooks Imperial

Defendant BOCC of the County of Elbert’s Motion for leave to file sur-reply brief and sur-reply brief

Case 07CV48 Order of January 30, 2008

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Nothing here about the master plan in authority over the BOCC.

http://www.elbertcounty-co.gov/documents/Planning_MasterPlan.doc

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Elbert judge stops Spring Valley development

By Tom McGhee
The Denver Post

Article Last Updated: 01/31/2008 04:44:08 PM MST

A judge has put a stop to controversial plans for a new development that would have increased the number of homes in Elbert County by nearly 70 percent. Elbert County District Court Judge Jeffrey Holmes ruled Wednesday that the County Commission abused its discretion by approving RCI Development Partners’ applications for a project called Spring Valley Vistas. The commission exceeded its jurisdiction by authorizing a development with housing density that would surpass limits permitted by the county’s master plan, Holmes said in the eight-page ruling. [Read more…]

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These gentleman believe in protecting the vision of Elbert County they claim we all desire, but who protects citizens from their vision? They’ll trot 5th Am. property rights out to defend your land against a toll road incursion, but woe unto those who try to exercise their own property rights to sell their water or land to maximize their own interest when such a sale conflicts with their vision. [Read more…]

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“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion[.]” 1st Am. U.S. Constitution

by Randal O’Toole

Conclusion

As it is usually practiced, regional growth management planning imposes huge costs on home buyers, renters, and businesses. Yet it provides negligible benefits: it does little to reduce sprawl (if that can even be considered a benefit), and its greatest social effect is to sort urban areas into central cities largely composed of young singles and childless couples and suburbs with high percentages of families with children.

The key to affordable housing is the availability of relatively unregulated vacant land for housing and other urban purposes. The effects of denying homebuilders access to such developable land appears to be an almost relentless upward push of housing prices. In 1979, price-to-income ratios in coastal California cities were greater than 4. By 1989, they exceeded 5.0. Thanks to a major recession in the early 1990s, they were still between 5 and 6 by 1999, but today they are mostly greater than 8. Prices may be declining now, but—unless changes are made—states such as Arizona, Florida, and Oregon whose price-to-income ratios were 4 or more in 2006 can expect to have California’s price-to-income ratios in a decade or two.

Remedies for unaffordable housing will require actions at the federal, state, and local levels.

• The federal government should revoke requirements that all urban areas must be represented by metropolitan planning organizations. Congress should also repeal the comprehensive, long-range planning requirements found in federal transportation and housing legislation.
• States with growth-management laws should repeal those laws and other states should avoid passing similar ones.
• Other state laws that give cities power to control the rate of development of rural areas, such as the California law creating local agency formation commissions, should also be repealed. Instead, states should insure that plenty of vacant land is available to meet each region’s need for housing and other land uses.
• Local governments should resist efforts by MPOs and other regional agencies to impose region-wide planning on their urban areas.
• As far as possible, infrastructure should be paid for by developers or property owners through annual user fees and special service districts rather than through up-front impact fees or general taxation.

Urban planners, of course, may oppose these actions. Instead, they aspire to pass growth-management laws in every state and impose growth-management plans on every urban area. The predictable result will be increasingly unaffordable housing, declining homeownership rates, and a growing disparity between the elite who own their own homes and a significant number of families who will never become homeowners.

Read the entire essay: The Planning Tax, The Case Against Regional Growth Management Planning

Responsive v Prescriptive Planning

“Innovation is the source of our progress. It is the cutting edge of the ever larger fulfillment of our aspirations. By attacking innovation, Regulation Man attacks tomorrow’s range of choice as well as today’s. By attacking an expanding technology, he attacks our capacity to solve tomorrow’s problems. All of this is done in the name of maintaining standards. We also lose choice when we surrender to bureaucratic agencies the power to make law. Our ability to influence legislation and to exercise some choice in it is very small even when laws are made by our representatives in open debate. This, by itself, is a powerful argument for minimizing the intervention of law into our lives. “The liberty of the subject.” said Thomas Hobbes, “depends upon the silence of the law.” By giving regulatory agencies the power to make detailed rules at will under very broad guidelines, we are surrendering even that vestigial element of control.

Of all of the laws to which we are subjected each year, only a very few are now made openly by our representatives, subject to some degree of public influence. Most emerge from the regulatory agencies as rules which have the full force and sanction of law. This is not only undemocratic; it is uncontrollable. Each agency rolls forward under its acquired momentum, propelled no longer by the will of the people but by the whim of the bureaucrat. The rules and innovations are not subject to full debate and Congressional approval: we are left with the rare and occasional power of specific Congressional veto, a power which can only be exercised after a vast time-consuming and heroic effort.

In many of the works of Regulation Man, the attention given to visible victims leaves the plight of the invisible victims unknown and unlamented. But when we add to all of those consequences the loss of our power as citizens to influence the rules which confine our behavior and restrict our choices, we can finally see the shape and the name of two of those previously unseen. The lesser of them is called democracy, and the greater one is called liberty.”

From:  Regulation Man and the Invisible Victim   By: Madsen Pirie

“Smart growth” is planning-speak for urban development, based on the principle that people should live in high-density, automobile-free, environmentally-minimal, urban centers. It tries to convince people they should want less rather than get more. Most people, however, want more. This is not a moral judgment. It’s just our nature.

In America most people migrate away from compartmented lives toward open spaces and freedom. The young start out renting in the cities and dream of the day they can reside in their own detached family structure. After building equity on that achievement they move up and out to the suburbs for more space. And then they keep going as far as they can to larger, more natural, more private spaces. At the top of the heap they buy small islands and large ranches in the West.

None of us escapes the fundamental economic principle of scarcity Our human nature is to have unlimited wants and limited means. And though our great country was built by humans who freely adapted and thrived in this construct, “smart growth” planners no longer trust us to find our own, best, natural economic balance. Instead, they dictate what our needs ought to be, and then they design the parameters of our lives so that we may some day rise to the limits they have predetermined.

They use government coercion to enforce zoning laws and we bear the burden of their communitarian vision of the greatest good for the greatest number. They’re not content with the tools available to non-bureaucratically-empowered citizens. Let the citizens have their constitutionally protected speech, their powers of persuasion, and their free choice. Let them squawk, “we” have the zoning laws.

Elbert County is full of people who migrated up and out of urban and suburban pasts. And why would they want to return to suburbia? That’s where they came from. Of course it’s a less attractive life to those that already live here. But to those on the other end of the spectrum desperate to escape the confines of the city, suburbia is a shining city on the hill. Are their fundamental rights any different than our own?

The crushing load of zoning legalese and politicking that the 20th century planning movement produced have not solved a single economic problem. They haven’t made people more happy, more healthy, more wealthy, or more wise. Rather, these bureaucracies have siphoned off and wasted untold amounts of scarce human energy in the fruitless pursuit of a mythical great society.

Get real people. Determinism never solved anything. We need to unleash human creativity to solve real problems, not enslave it to the code of a monolithic state. Elbert County won’t solve it’s water scarcity or preserve it’s quality of life through planning and zoning. Skilled lawyers create arguments to achieve any purpose under any set of circumstances and any set of laws. That is the nature of our language. Planning is, quite simply, a legal venue for third parties with no stake in our lives to control us. Planners have had decades to prove that planning works, yet the problems stay a step ahead of them. We should leave this relic of 20th century progressivism in the 20th century and move on.

Brooks Imperial

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Smart Growth Doesn’t Just Threaten Urban Areas

Recent reports from smart-growth groups have shown that their goals are not limited to reshaping American urban areas. They also want to impose their high-density, mixed-use visions on small towns while they freeze development in rural areas. [Read more…]

Subdivide and Conquer – Australian style

Smart Growth is an urban planning and transportation theory that concentrates growth in the center of a city to avoid urban sprawl; and advocates compact, transit-oriented, walkable, bicycle-friendly land use, including mixed-use development with a range of housing choices.

The group who attend each planning commission meeting to lobby against development and growth, yet who never manage to persuade the planning commission or the BOCC to see things their way, should consider why they are ineffective in stopping growth.  There are only two reasonable explanations.  Either they are, in themselves, poor representatives, or they in fact, do not represent a majority of citizens.  These periodic laments in the local fishwrap reinforcing a self-image of heroic victims of the money-grubbing enviro-stomping capitalist development nightmare, may comfort some people, but this position leads to only one conclusion –total obstruction.  Cobbles of “smart” to growth, “health and well being” to environment, “unique” to Elbert County, and “commitment” to the future, all make nice sound bites, but from a bunch of folks with self-proclaimed vision, I would expect a little more discussable content.  Slogans are just not persuasive. 

[Read more…]