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The Finest Trick of the Developer is to Persuade You That Free Markets Should Not Exist

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“Henry George and the Dragon” cartoon. Public domain.

New York City Council candidate Alexa Avilés asserts that “the free market will never provide decent housing for all, and we should stop pretending otherwise” (“The Free Market Will Never Provide Decent Housing for All,” The Indypendent, April 2).  Who’s pretending?

Avilés doesn’t outright claim that the current housing market is free, but implies that a free market would reinforce the existing power of “banks and corporate landlords” over “tenants in private housing, NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] residents, and small homeowners.”

In treating the latter as the only beneficiaries of intervention in the market — and conflating a free market with policies that “let big developers take control” — Avilés ignores what Roderick T. Long notes are the far larger effects of “regulations that strangle competition in the housing market.”

Assuming that “developers’ greed drives gentrification and displacement” obscures the ways that limiting competition distorts supply and demand. Market competition compelled stockbrokers, who are not generally distinguished by an absence of greed, to reduce trading fees from $199 to $8.

Long concludes that a free housing market would be one “with landlords competing for tenants,” so that “rental contracts would cease to be as one-sidedly favorable to the landlord as they often are today.” Tenants would also enjoy more power to take many of the steps recommended by Avilés toward ownership, such as “the opportunity to collectively purchase” their buildings.

Moreover,  any free market approach must make unjustified land claims null and void. As Murray Rothbard put it, in such cases any “reform is picayune and fails to reach the heart of the question” short of “an immediate vacating of the title … with certainly no compensation to the aggressors who had wrongly seized control of the land.”

Avilés’s “Green New Deal for NYCHA” could take a page from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and revisit the writings of Henry George, who carried forth the tradition of combining free trade with land reform pioneered by such market liberals as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. FDR wanted George’s works to be “better known and more clearly understood” since they “contain much that would be helpful today.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

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Time to Get Government Off Our Lawns

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Photo by Magda Ehlers via Pexels
Photo by Magda Ehlers via Pexels

It’s spring, and for many Americans that means it’s time to drag out the mower and trimmer, invest in various seeds, feeds, pesticides, etc., and quite possibly put the water bill on steroids with daily sprinkler operation. According to the American Time Use Survey, the average American spends 70 hours — nearly two full work weeks — on lawn maintenance every year.

The lawn is such a familiar part of everyday American life that it might seem like the natural state of things.  In reality, it’s evolved over the last two centuries from an aristocratic plaything to what Washington Post columnist Christopher Ingraham rightly calls a “soul-crushing timesuck” that most of us would be better off without.

More to the point, the lawn is effectively a regressive tax scheme that benefits the sellers of expensive equipment and  those who use that equipment in our stead if we can afford to hire them.

Lawns originated with the European nobility of the late Middle Ages — people who owned plenty of land and could afford staff (assisted by large herds of sheep) to keep the grass cut short. By the 18th century, lawns were places for snobbish parties and social games such as croquet and tennis.

The first lawnmowers appeared in the 1830s, and over the next century, culminating with the introduction of “affordable” gas-powered push mowers, lawns became increasingly popular with “lower-class” imitators of the rich.

But until after World War 2, most of us regular people, even if we had houses, still didn’t have “lawns.” We had “yards.” Yards were generally smaller, and were more likely to be bare dirt or vegetable garden than carefully manicured grass of a single species.

Yards became lawns as they got bigger and as they became situated in the post-war cookie-cutter housing developments where developers or homeowner associations promoted property-value-preserving uniformity. You had to have a “lawn” of St. Augustine grass kept to no more than three inches in height for the same reason you couldn’t paint your house pink or put your old Chevy up on blocks in the driveway.

Local governments, seeing an irresistible opportunity to pass new ordinances, took their cue from the developers and HOAs and joyfully added lawn care to their already endless excuses for levying fines on the neglectful and recalcitrant.

The ill effects go beyond lost time, wasted money, and forced dealings with nosy bureaucrats. In addition to reduced biodiversity (exacerbated by ordinances dictating a few types of acceptable lawn vegetation) and the use of millions of pounds of unnecessary pesticides every year, Ted Steinberg tells us in American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, our palsied hands spill 17 million gallons of gas — half again as much as the Exxon Valdez vomited onto Alaska’s coastline in 1989 — every year while refueling lawn maintenance equipment.

Xeriscaping, ornamental and vegetable gardening, etc. are increasingly popular alternative approaches to yard use. But for those of us who really want to be done with lawns, an important first step is getting governments off of them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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America Unchurched: A Sign of the Times

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Free photo from Pexels by Daniel Borges
Free photo from Pexels by Daniel Borges

For the first time in its more than eight decades of surveying Americans’ religious attitudes and practices, Gallup reports,  church members constituted only 47% of the US population in 2020 — down 23% since 1999, prior to which the percentage seldom dipped below 70%.

Why the precipitous drop, and what might it portend for the future?

“The decline in church membership,” the Gallup report says, “is primarily a function of the increasing number of Americans who express no religious preference.” In 2000, Americans who didn’t consider themselves religious at all comprised 8% of the population. Today, 21% answer to that description.

While there’s obviously an interrelationship there, I suspect it’s more complicated than the former being “primarily a function of” the latter.

For one thing, not being a believer may be as much effect as cause. The child who isn’t raised in church, or whose family isn’t as involved in that church as families used to be, is probably less prone to either religious belief or church affiliation as an adult.

Also, churches are far from the only community organizations struggling to maintain their membership numbers.

In 1973, America boasted more than 4 million Boy Scouts from a population of 215 million. Today, that number is 2.3 million from a population of 330 million.

Despite three decades of continuous war, creating millions of eligible members, veterans’ organizations like the American Legion are in decline as older members die and younger prospects pass on the affiliation.

We hear a lot about social fragmentation and political polarization these days, and these numbers are probably relevant to those problems.

As a libertarian, I’m inclined to see the hoary hand of the state behind all bad things, and I can a make a case for that here. The increased reach of the welfare state makes the charity functions of churches and other social organizations less urgent, while the grasp of the regulatory state makes operating physical establishments more expensive. One can almost hear Mussolini muttering from beyond the grave: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

But if that’s part of the cause, it’s far from the whole cause.

It’s no coincidence that the decline in physical group participation maps closely to the growth of fast and affordable Internet access.

Back in the old days (i.e., the childhoods of those over 50), meeting with others who shared our interests meant physically traveling to a central location. Today,  it is  (or at least can be, as a year of pandemic has shown) as simple as opening your laptop or picking up your phone.

That phenomenon comes with down sides. We’re self-segregating into echo chambers where our priors are affirmed and those who disagree are unwelcome.

But it also comes with up sides, such as instant, on-demand fellowship, across vast distances, with others who share our interests.

We’re in the midst of the most tumultuous social changes in decades, if not centuries.  Churches, and the rest of us, are going to have to ride this storm out and hope for sunnier weather on the other side.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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