Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it’s hard to not see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things, as though all life’s comforts and structural certainties rested on a groaning fault line. ~ James Howard Kunstler

Perhaps the most compelling argument I’ve read against Walmart is the very same argument that one hears against sprawl – namely, that it is the result of a vast network of government intervention and central planning.  The very nature of Walmart is one which requires a car culture, and as we all know, the car culture would not have been possible without enormous amounts of state subsidies, draconian zoning laws, and so forth.  In other words, without the highway projects, the protection of the auto industry, and the many zoning practices in place in modern America, Walmart would not exist – at least in its current form.  As it stands, given our car culture, given our sprawl, Walmart acts as a benefit to many consumers.

That is the stumbling block I come back to when I consider my own distaste for Walmart.  In a real free market economy, sans all the government regulations and subsidies, Walmart would not even be an issue.  The many more diverse and denser places in America would not wanted or needed a Walmart to come set up shop.  But given the world we have created for ourselves, what is the alternative?  Can we very well deny poor people one of the only places that they can afford to buy cheap goods at?  Or, more to the point, should we demonize what is quite obviously a symptom of the larger problem?

Taking a closer look at the problem, we turn once again to Austin Bramwell, who has penned a brief response to James Howard Kunstler’s take on John Stossel on the subject of sprawl.  He writes,

Stossel defends suburban sprawl and accuses its opponents — like Kunstler — of forcing lifestyle choices onto others “by limiting where they can build.” The fallacy of this view has been pointed out about 100 times. For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations.  If Stossel wants to expand Americans’ lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending, namely, suburban sprawl.

It’s odd that self-described libertarians such as Stossel are so slow to grasp that government planning makes sprawl ubiquitous. You would think that libertarians would instinctively grasp the deeply statist nature of suburban development.  First of all, with a depressingly few exceptions, virtually every town in America looks the same. That is, it has the same landscape of arterial roads, strip malls, and residential subdivisions, accessibly only by car. Surely, given America’s celebrated diversity, you would also see a diversity of places. As it turns out, all but a few people live the same suburban lifestyle.  Government, as libertarian assumptions would predict, is the culprit.

Second, the few places in America that have a distinctive character are also exceedingly expensive. John Stossel himself admits to living in an apartment and walking to work most days. Now, I don’t know where exactly Mr. Stossel lives, but it sounds as if he lives in Manhattan, where residential space costs over $1000 a square foot (that means a two-bedroom apartment where a family of four could fit costs at least $1.5 million).  If Mr. Stossel’s lifestyle, as he puts it, is less popular than the suburban lifestyle, then why does his cost so much more? He apparently never asks himself the question. Had he done so, he might have discovered that government artificially restricts the supply of Manhattan-like places but artificially increases the supply of sprawl. That’s the reason Americans “prefer” to live in the suburbs. They don’t have a choice.

At this point ‘choice’ becomes a very tricky thing indeed.  Now that we’ve been, essentially, pushed into the suburbs – where cars and big boxes are simply a matter of life – what should we do about it?  Should we choose somehow to limit the existence of these big boxes?  Would this help us in our addiction to vehicular transport?  Many of the restored walkable communities around the country are either prohibitively expensive or Disney-fied versions of the America that once was.  Those who benefit the most from Walmart and its big box counterparts in this sprawling world of ours are also the poorest among us.  Would they benefit, also, from some other world?  I think so – but getting there is fraught with danger.

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“I don’t want to say that liberaltarianism is dead. But is it endangered? Sure. It deserves to be.” ~ Jason Kuznicki

I think the hopes placed in the Obama administration by libertarians have been fairly well dashed at this point.  On civil-liberties issues and on economic issues, the President has not gone nearly far enough to end the bad practices of the last administration, or to promote anything like market solutions to the many problems facing the country.  Jason goes on to write:

If libertarians seem more conservative lately, it’s not only that we’ve been pushed away by the left. Attendees at this year’s CPAC ranked “reducing size of federal government” and “reducing government spending” as by far their highest policy priorities. They also chose Ron Paul as their preferred presidential candidate. Those same attendees even booed speaker Ryan Sorba for condemning gay Republicans:

I’m not sure the left-libertarian alliance was ever really meant to be anything more than a fragile oppositional alliance to the big-spenders masquerading as conservatives during the Bush years, united by a common antipathy over the wars and the infringements upon civil liberties.  I know Mark has hopes that a populist left-right alliance could rise from the ashes of the current establishment, but I see the fundamental divide between Tea Partiers and progressives as too wide a gap for anything but a similarly tenuous & oppositional alliance.

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Will asks a few good questions about markets and economies of scale, to which Kevin Carson (among others) provides some very good answers from his own unique, mutualist perspective.

Will asks, “are localism and a free market economy reconcilable?”

This is a good question.  When I began blogging at the League I was on a big localist kick, and walked down the localist/protectionist path about as far as I could before I bumped up against too many inconsistencies in that philosophy to ignore.  Nevertheless, I remain convinced that local politics and strong communities are essential to a prosperous, healthy society, and that decentralization – though not a perfect solution for every problem – remains the best way to avoid amassing too much power into specific regions, entities, or industries.  To my mind, free markets are the best way to ensure this, though the sad fact is that rarely are markets truly free, and so we continually find ourselves in semi-free market situations, with large corporate interests and “too-big-to-fail” players reaping far more benefits from the state than they should.

Nevertheless, I do think localism and free trade are reconcilable, even if we can never feasibly return to the counterfactual Carson imagines – to a world without state-subsidized roads and rail (and so on and so forth).  Government, whether we like it or not, will remain involved in our infrastructure and I doubt that the state has any plans to further disentangle itself from the web of protectionist policies now in place.  The special interests have a pretty tight hold over those policies – whether we’re talking about agribusiness or tire manufacturers or Goldman Sachs. [Read more →]

A day or two ago, I offhandedly endorsed an article from Jagdish Bhagwati on the continued relevance of global free trade. This provoked a few heated responses from Kevin Carson, who has long argued that economic globalization is almost entirely a result of an elaborate web of state-subsidized networks like public transportation. A truly free market, Carson argues, would privilege locally produced goods and services over  long-distance competitors, who rely on an artificial network of state intervention to sustain their business model. It’s an interesting hypothesis, though absent a visit to some alternate universe without railroads and the interstate highway system, I don’t think we will ever be able to conclusively test the merits of his argument. Carson’s comments have provoked a few of my own thoughts on the intersection of local concerns and the free market, however:

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“I have this crazy notion that there is a point where  Red Toryism and the kind of libertarian ideas E.D. is promoting could work together.”  ~ Chris Dierkes

I suppose I’m either hopelessly conflicted about my own political and social views and values (“beloved but somewhat confused” as Bob Cheeks would have it), or else I’m working slowly toward a sort of synthesis that I don’t think is properly represented in the modern American political spectrum.  That is, I envision something that embraces limited government, free markets, and so forth, but without the unhealthy emphasis on individualism, corporatism, and consumerism so infused to our modern conservative and libertarian movements.  I’m not saying we should demonize these things, but they should be cast in their proper roles – as byproducts of liberty and prosperity, rather than as the be-all-end-all of our lives and politics.  Along with this, I’d like to see a politics that emphasizes limited, efficient government but does not demonize all government and all actions of the state (save military, of course) and works to govern, regulate, and so forth in the least intrusive, most effective way possible.  This would almost certainly require a severing of ties between big government and big business – as well as big government and big labor, for that matter.

And of course, culturally, I’d like some sort of progressive traditionalism that at once embraced the need for progress (social, economic, technological, etc.) as well as the irreplacable value of tradition.  Cultivating tradition and traditional values while at the same time embracing progress often seems a hopeless task, but I think that under the surface, it’s also the modus operandi of the ages.  This give and take is always with us.  I’m fairly traditional in many ways – with a strong belief in the nuclear family, in the importance of one parent staying home with the kids, and so forth, yet for those same reasons I support gay marriage, I support womens’ rights, etc.  (A stay at home parent can almost as easily be a dad, after all).  It’s why I believe in social equality and include the rights of the unborn as part of that social equality.  Indeed, I think a pro-life movement that embraced cultural diversity, sexual equality, and homosexual gay rights would be a far more successful movement in the long run, though in the short term….

So Chris mentions this potential fusion of Red Toryism and Libertarianism, and I think that’s the right trajectory for a political movement to reshape America – a more “progressive” conservatism, to be sure, and one that places emphasis on the small, the local, the communal and decentralized, but also on economic freedom and human rights.  I see a number of good ideas which could spawn from such a hybrid: [Read more →]

One fundamental flaw in the idealized concept of small town America is the lack of freedom to exit.  In small towns the freedom to exit is greatly reduced – especially in rural areas where towns are spread out.  Social choice and economic choice are both limited in these areas, and both are equally important.  The freedom to change schools or social circles is far more limited in small towns and rural areas than in larger cities and this can contribute to some of the problems we’ve been seeing in these areas such as rising meth abuse, high teen pregnancy, and other social ills once associated more with inner cities.

Much of this also has to do with economic class of course.  Freedom to exit is always more limited for the lower class, and this is exacerbated in small towns.  [Read more →]

I have been rather harsh in my treatment of the “rugged individual” in these pages, and yet have come to an essentially libertarian position on most economic issues.  At the heart of libertarian philosophy is at least some degree of faith in the individual to make the best, or at least the most rational or most predictable, decision.  (Faith may be the wrong word….)  Still, I believe my social critique of the “rugged individual” is compatible with classical liberal economics (as opposed to economic populism, socialism, or distributism etc. etc.)

Individualism, properly understood, is a different animal altogether than the “rugged individual” of American myth – and even further distant from the entitled individual born into our own senseless era of wealth and purposelessness, severed from our communities and our history and our culture.  Individualism means more than what it has come to mean in either of these senses.

The “rugged individual” has been mythologized as the bootstrapper – the American business mogul who pulled himself up from humble beginnings into a position of power and wealth.  The entitled individual is spoiled, shallow, skeptical of the value of hard work, more interested in selfish pursuits than in helping others, detached from consequence, and possessed of an odd expectation that they deserve a great job, great pay, lots of toys – all for simply existing.  Both are examples of the so-called American Dream – one its myth, and one the consequence, perhaps, of that myth. [Read more →]

I stayed at a quaint bed and breakfast this weekend in a charming old mining town on a little mountain in the desert.  It’s now home to dozens of artists and artisans – painters, potters, glass-blowers, musicians, etc. – and a favorite for both bikers and tourists alike.  Lots of old somewhat dilapidated or restored houses and crumbling streets.  I thought to myself – it would be fun to live here.  Everything is so old and quirky.

After a while, though, I realized I’d quickly tire of it, run out of options and things to do, run out of choices that I take for granted now.  The aesthetics drew me in, much as the aesthetics of any old, charming place might.  Indeed, I think much of the real visceral appeal of localism has a great deal to do with the aesthetics of charming places, with our notion of what such charming places must be like rather than the often less-interesting reality. [Read more →]

I want to reuse this title sometime, because I think it’s really good.  I got it from this really good post by JL Wall over at Upturned Earth, responding to both myself and Nathan about the pitfalls of localism, free trade, and so forth.  More on this later….

I have to admit, I haven’t been following the dust-up between the First Thingers/ Pomocons and the Front Porchers all that closely.  But I must say, that what I have read has been some pretty compelling stuff, and this post by Peter Lawler is right on the money when it comes to a smart critique of the larger localist philosophy.  I think that for those cultural critics with a strong distaste for some aspects of modernity and individuality, localism can seem like a pretty good answer, because it seems to embody what community ought to be – what we’ve lost as we’ve modernized socially and technologically.

Lawler is right, though, local communities are often not in real life what we sometimes imagine them to be.  And modern technology in many of its forms is very much a net gain for humanity.

Where I think I’ve started to draw the line is between “localism” and the concept of neighborhood.  Neighborhoods are important no matter the size of the town or city.  They can allow families and individuals to interact – or they can lay the groundwork for isolation.  Probably the central critique that localists offer is that of the atomized individual (or individual family, I’d add.  Many families find themselves cut off from their neighbors and communities.)  But one does not need “localism” or a return to a rooted sense of place to achieve better communities and more connected neighborhoods. [Read more →]

Read Daniel McCarthy’s critique of the Front Porch, dovetailing rather nicely with many of my own reservations of the localists and agrarians: [Read more →]

(h/t: Tim Lilburn for the title)

I’ve been a bit off the map of late due to a pick up of busyness in my personal life. As some have read in a variety of places, I am getting married in seventeen days and am moving into a condo that my soon-to-be-wife and I recently closed the deal on two days after the nuptials. Getting married and buying your first home is a lot to take on in the same time span, admittedly, and it has kept us running pretty fast from place-to-place and task-to-task for the past couple of weeks.

We chose to overlap the two in the way that we did because if you’ve got the work and the down payment to swing it, now is a pretty good time to be in the market for a home. And, well, the wedding has been scheduled for some time now. So I guess we represent one of the few bright stories from this economic catastrophe: we were able to take advantage of a depressed market to maximize our equity and leverage ourselves into a pretty fantastic home that has pretty much everything that we were looking for (including more than 1100 square feet of space).

More than a few people have commented that for the price we paid for the condo we could have bought a perfectly lovely house, which is true. We chose not to buy a house because we couldn’t afford one in the corresponding neighbourhood in which we wanted to continue living and so went about finding a condo in which it would be feasible to begin raising a family (hence the relatively monstrous square footage).

Now, there is more going here than just a snobbish desire to live close to downtown on our part and it relates back to our ongoing discussions around g/localism. Granted my soon-to-be-wife and I have a loathing for the idea of having to move ourselves out to the suburbs if we want to start raising a family that is perhaps only rivaled by our loathing for the community association in the neighbourhood we are moving just outside of. It is fair to say that we like our neighbourhood and were not prepared to give up for the promise of a house. But we also happen to be philosophically opposed to the notion that for younger people, having a family means leaving the downtown core. [Read more →]