The former, save when applied retroactively (which, I concede, may be necessary for successful implementation), rather than punishing, merely prevents: It compels a successful businessman to decided between expanding and facing increased taxation (A few stores in the chain may not incur problematic penalty, but ten, or twenty, or four thousand are taxed to the point of being financially stupid.)

The latter simply makes taxation and property distribution fairer and more equitable God/mother nature/the Big Bang/whatever created the land; we didn’t. While we have a(t least a Lockean) right to the wealth we create by mixing our labor with the land, we have little claim to the value of the land itself, which we did not give really good (or bad) soil or access to water. Nor do we alone generate increased property values because we happen to be in a popular location. The (LOCAL) government, as manifestation of our sovereignty, and the local community, as generator of the wealth, ought to benefit from the value that we did not create, rather than letting us have our money for nothing (and our chicks, presumably, for free).

I don’t provided this to counter, but to add to, Mr Carson’s prescriptions.

It’s not necessary to use coercion to prevent people shopping at Wal-Mart. The very existence of large corporations serving the national market, their supply-push marketing, and their “warehouses on wheels” distribution chains, depends on a heavily subsidized, high-volume national transportation system.

Fund the Interstates entirely with weight-based tolls on trucks (which cause virtually all the roadbed damage), eliminate all external subsidies to civil aviation, and eliminate eminent domain as an option for building new highways and airports and expanding existing ones, and the enormously increased costs of distribution will take care of consumer preferences.

Supply and distribution chains will be shortened and the manufacturing ecconomy will be relocalized. Manufacturing will probably be a lot closer to the Emilia-Romagna model, rather than the Sloan mass-production model: integrating small-scale, general purpose machinery into craft production, with frequent switches between small production runs in response to orders. The distribution chains from manufacturers to retailers will be local and regional–hence no Wal-Mart.

When the full cost of long-distance shipping and large-scale irrigation of giant agribusiness plantations is fully reflected in their supermarkt price rather than in your tax bill, out of season strawberries will be an occasional luxury grown in greenhouses.

BTW, we should bear in mind that the prevailing tastes for mass-market chain culture didn’t “just grow,” like Topsy. It was itself the product of a deliberate and concerted top-down social engineering effort, after WWI, to rebuild society on mass consumption and consumer credit . The mass advertising and PR industries were founded by Lasswell et al, the same people who had founded the science of propganda to manipulate the public into supporting St. Woodrow’s crusade. Public school Home Ec classes and corporate mass advertisers, in a propaganda campaign that foreshadowed Nestle’s genocidal marketing of infant formula in the Third World as “modern” and “Western,” systematically stigmatized home-baked bread and homemade anything as “backward” and “old-fashioned.” The thing is, they HAD to reengineer the culture, because the central problem facing industry (in Ralph Borsodi’s words) was to find a way to market profitably what it could produce running at full capacity. If people were left alone to replace their clothes when they wore out, eat when they were hungry , and follow their existing preferences without regard to brand names, people would have cut back to 20- or 30-hour workweeks as productivity increased, and half of industrial capacity would have turned to rust in the face of a glutted market. As the World-Controller’s hypnopaedic socialization put it, “The more stitches, the less riches; ending is better than mending.”

Which is the same argumennt that my wife makes for corporate eateries. Hotels. Etc. So we are all “guilty” to some extent.

Seriously. at this very moment, she is sending me out the door to get sandwiches for lunch. I live in Pittsburgh, so there are a lot of old-school, local joints around. One of the most famous is right down the street. Great stuff.

My wife would rather kill herself than eat soemthing from there. She is making me go to the place next door. Subway.

The same holds when we travel. We pas diner after diner and eat at Arbys after Arbys. Even when Arbys costs more and is harder to get to.

She hates “character.” In fact, she hates “place.” She likes corporate eateries, corporate shopping, corporate hotels. She would never, under any circumstances, buy a chicken from a local butcher. If I brought one homw, she would throw it away. She wants Tyson or Purdue. She does not like local music. When we were dating, I had to drag her to my favorite dive bars. she would rather drink–DRINK!–at TGIFridays.

And guess what: I think the worlkd has more people like her than me and you.

Even if the playing field is level and we remove all the rent-seeking, she goes to Arby’s and the local joint dies.

Now throw in REAL advantages. Walmart enjoys economies of scale. It is open longer hours. These things are true whether or not the local governments give them handouts.

Because of this: I think there is a distinct possibility that a whole slew of people, maybe even a substantial majority, prefer McDonald’s to Joe’s Old Tyme Culture Burger. And that all things being equal, most people would prefer to shop at WalMart than at Ye Olde Mom and Pop’s Hardware. And people really do seem to prefer 7,500 square-foot McMansions with BACK patios, and driving to work in their Hummers.

Maybe I am wrong. But I don’t think that’s obvious. So sure, we can have a grand social experiment in which we try to make people pay the full costs of their decisions. But what if they keep making what we consider bad decisions?

What if people from Buffalo keep eating strawberries in December?

You either accept it, or you start using coercion (taxation, regulation, zoning, etc) to keep people in line.

But if we are the watchmen, who watches us? And what happens when a hard charger takes over and tells me I can’t blog anymore because I have to go to the church social and eat locally crafted jello molds with seasonal fruits and berries?

That is, I think it’s pretty easy to wrestle with these lifestyle questions on a personal level. But I really fear what happens of a substantial number of people start to take me seriously.

True a lot of people enjoy the familiarity of Village Inn or Motel 8 or any other number of indistinct businesses that are just like the other. I wonder if that’s more symptomatic of where we’ve gotten as a culture than inherently what people are most comfortable with. I suppose I just enjoy the uniqueness of local establishments better, and perhaps on that level it’s a matter of preference. On the level of property distribution and ownership, though, there are other problems with this model. But I do very much understand the good that it can bring as well.