I’ve always said the basic principle of local government, particularly zoning, is, “You have the right to control everyone’s property except your own.” Graham Moomaw reports in the Charlottesville Daily Progress on the latest example of this principle in operation:
The owners of Arganica Farm Club, a distributor that makes weekly organic-food deliveries to more than 10,000 customers in Virginia, Washington and Maryland, were hit with [an Albemarle] county zoning violation on May 16. The violation notice claims Arganica is running “warehouse/packing plant operations” on a stretch of Fray’sMill Road zoned as a rural district.
Neighbors say the dozens of cars parked out front and a stream of delivery trucks have eroded the aesthetic value of the historic Holly Tree Farm in Advance Mills, the company’s home base.
Arganica uses an online ordering system that allows customers in the greater Washington area, Baltimore, Richmond, Hampton Roads and Charlottesville to order “farm-fresh, artisan and organic” food from local producers and vendors from around the country. At Holly Tree Farm, those orders are filled in reusable wooden crates and sent out for doorstep delivery.
The “aesthetic value” argument shows just how far the intellectual property mentality contaminates the exercise of genuine property rights. If a property owner can’t engage in routine business on his own land because neighbors object to “erosion” of intangible values, then property rights in scarce objects are meaningless.
But back to the main point. Arganica’s owner, Dominique Kostelac, is not taking the county’s actions lying down:
“Though we employed around 100 people and redirected millions of dollars in urban consumer spending to local farms and small Albemarle artisan producers as well as plow millions in national and international investment into our Albemarle County-based business, a select but unelected few have taken an adversarial stance to us and dealt a mean blow to both workers and producers,” Kostelac said in an email.
He’s right to attack the “selected but unelected few” as the real problem here. While regulators of all stripes claim the protection and “legitimacy” of the democratic system, in truth these folks are no more agents of democracy than a third-world dictator. Most people will cover their ears and repeat to themselves, “They’re just enforcing the law,” ignoring the reality that there is no law here, just vague mandates that are constantly subject to the changing whims of whatever bureaucrat happens to declare himself in charge that day.
When people accept schemes like zoning codes, what they’re saying is, “We value wealth-destroying bureaucrats over wealth-producing businesses.” It’s that simple. Because there’s no such thing as a regulatory scheme with 100% compliance. Even if nobody is breaking a given set of rules, the bureaucrats are compelled by the nature of their positions to manufacture violations — not only to justify keeping their present positions and salaries, but to ensure the potential for future growth in demand for regulations.
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I expect to see more of this from the government parasites as budget deficits put extreme pressure for reducing government employees and reducing the size of government. We will hear of all the services we will lose if we don’t repent and pay more taxes. Government is a monopoly and charges monopolistic prices for its so-called protection. It is an employee run monopoly. To increase its numbers of employees it has a huge incentive to be inefficient and it is. The Post Office is but one example. The government employees have created an army of dependent predators sucking off the system unable to provide for themselves. The government has encouraged counter-productive behavior and it will end in national suicide. It will end in bankruptcy and revolution and very soon the bill will be due and the bill is going to be paid one way or the other.
There seems to be a strange dichotomy within many who claim to support both local, organic produce, and government regulation of industry. I had a science professor last year who extolled the virtues of organic farming for its low impact on the environment, but also showed unwaivering support for statist interventions to the economy. She simply couldn’t understand that in many cases, the very government she lauded was actively destroying, or at least hindering, the small businesses she patronized.
They want to have their kale and eat it, too. Without realizing it, many people want and expect the state to do what’s right for THEM while denying the obvious possibility that that will mean doing what’s WRONG for someone else. The can’t (or won’t) see the unseen.
Instead of praying to God to fix things nowadays people just pray to government.
If government is good and organic farming is good then we need to use the good government to help good farmers. That makes the world a better place.
I am very sure that the professor’s line of reasoning doesn’t extend much beyond that.
Most people don’t see government itself as a systemic failure. They don’t see it as the common problem. A majority feels that it can be tinkered with endlessly until it works, despite the evidence that government cannot be “reformed” and is a fundamentally flawed concept. If you don’t have an alternative theory of societal order, you just stick with the devil you know. So many end up believing that if we just have the smart guys in charge (relative only to their own opinions – ie, just vote for the politician that sounds most like ME), things will change for the better.
Remember, only libertarians consider that most basic axiom of libertarianism – non-aggression. It never enters others’ minds. For nearly everybody in the world, government is a given. Political force is a must. They won’t see the contradiction between hindering one business while helping another, all the while using the same State gun. Without recognizing that the State is nothing but pure violence, people will not understand such a basic insight as “the government that can give you everything you want, can also take it all away.”
When people understand the concepts of coercion and voluntarism, the rest falls apart by itself.
Thankfully, I think the era of zoning laws is over. IMHO, they were one of the unintended consequences of the Federal Reserve system, and IMHO, that system of fraudulent money can not survive the information age.
Just like if somebody sucked all the moisture out of a rain forest, and pumped it into a canal … the natural consequence would be for all the ecosystem to die off except for the plants planted in the most irrigated areas. Well, IMHO this is sort of what happened with the Federal Reserve. With all new credit coming from a centralized source, instead of through savings, people could in theory get more immediate profit by “channeling” all that credit into key corridors and “zones”. IMHO, with the housing crash, that era is over. For hundreds of years prior to the Fed, the US didn’t really have zoning laws, and I think that is mostly because they were not profitable, until printed money came along to prop them up.
You will see ghost malls and tent cities. This will put a huge stress on zoning laws.
“there is no law here”What would the definition of law be in this context? I’m sure I’ve seen Mr. Oliva use it in this manner before, just looking for clarification from a presumably An-Cap perspective- thanks!
In this case law would mean something even approaching the legislative process, whereby a law is put up for a vote and atleast debated by those who will be voting on it.
Leaving aside the whole question of whether even THAT is desirable (from a libertarian standpoint it isn’t, law in our world is more the discovery due to property rights violations sort of law), regulatory agencies never actually do this. They are empowered by congress to set the law AS THEY SEE FIT to do so. In this respect it is not at all genuine law; it is simply the dictats of whoever is in power of the regulatory agency at that time.
Also the fact that countless companies are in constant violation of some regulation or previous ruling, and the only things keeping them from being persecuted are some combination of chance, political connections, the whim of the regulators, and the manpower/time of the regulatory agency.
Urbanism forces an aesthetic uniformity among structures of a same zone. New house developments look weird because all houses are the same color, the same shape, the same size. It gets boring real fast.
Just a reading suggestion – I recently read James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like A State” which deals extensively with this very topic. I’d highly recommend it.
Ironic that this is taking place in Albemarle County, home of Thomas Jefferson.
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