A Stitch in Haste

Tyler Cowen asks a simple question:

How good would the abolition of zoning in New York City be?

Of course, that question completely drops the context within which "good" is embedded. Stated differently: "Good" -- by what metric? Real estate values? Total available housing stock? Aesthetics? Whose aesthetics?

Suddenly it's not so simple a question after all.

How about defining "good" as "respecting property rights and constitutional principles"? As I commented at Cowen's blog:

Sorry for the Clintonism, but it depends (as you note) on what your definition of "zoning" is.

First-order zoning -- an area is simply designated "residential," "commercial" or "industrial" -- is not an excruciating abomination to libertarians and can be defended, at least in the abstract, as externality-correcting.

Second-order zoning -- height restrictions are the best example -- are less defensible and should be presumed illegitimate (i.e., restrictions should be subject to heightened scrutiny). This is the kind of "zoning" imposed on most of Manhattan.

Third-order zoning -- where any and every alteration, expansion or demolition must be submitted to an unelected board with near-plenary authority to approve or reject the project -- for any reason up to and including the whim and caprice of the board members -- is per se illegitimate, and under any sane jurisprudence such an infringement of fundamental property rights would be an irrebuttable due process violation. (So-called "historic districts" -- of which there are many in New York City -- are the most egregious example.)

Yes, the "first-second-third" nomenclature is my own concoction, inspired by similar terminology in the context of price discrimination.

More thoughts from Perfect Substitute

Now available — the Stitch in Haste Podcast, Episode #004.

In this episode: Why Diamond is a libertarian --

• Dogs are property-rights Lockeans.


• My adventures with the dog licensing bureaucracy.


• The divine-right theory of parks commissioners.


• Why breed-specific legislation is unconstitutional.

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About the Podcast:

The idea will be to record a quick commentary, no more than weekly (and typically less than weekly) and never longer than 20 minutes, either about something I don't feel like covering in a full-blown blogpost, or something that I have already covered in the blog and don't feel like revisiting. Eventually I might include responses to comments, interviews, roundtable discussions, etc.

Related post chain: Breed-Specific Legislation Blogposting.

A blog I don't read, on the Obama "bitter" kerfuffle:

By nearly every measure, working-class Midwesterners and Pennsylvanians, black and white, have been left behind for the last thirty years. They were failed by Clinton and Bush administration policies that allowed major corporations tax breaks for sheltering their money in offshore havens. They were stiffed by a wild-West subprime mortgage market whose collapse has forced many blue-collar homeowners into foreclosure. They lived in places that have been ravaged by sixty years of systematic federal disinvestment. They were left behind by the Republican evisceration of labor laws that once protected the rights of workers to organize. They have watched their wages have stagnated, as their pensions and benefits have been cut, and as their once decent jobs have been replaced by McJobs.

To which I commented at a blog I do read, which cited the above passage favorably:

So everyone's to blame except: (1) the unions that collectively bargained almost every heavy industry in America straight into bankruptcy, and (2) the local politicians who had decade after decade to "do something" about their declining economic bases? Go figure.

New York City has seen its economic base wiped out with a regularity that would put cicadas to shame. Slave-running gave way to agriculture gave way to Erie Canal terminus gave way to light manufacturing gave way to finance gave way to heavy manufacturing gave way to corporate nexus gave way to shipping gave way to heavy industry gave way to new corporate nexus gave way to finance gave way to "Silicon Alley" gave way to...

Times change, economies change — cities must change too. New York has been doing so for almost 400 years. Other American cities, such as San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, St. Louis, San Diego, and countless others have, via their entrepreneurs, likewise reinvented themselves with at least some success.

What, exactly, are Pittsburgh's, Cleveland's and Detroit's excuse (besides "systematic federal disinvestment" -- whatever that is supposed to mean)?

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As for Obama's speech itself, I have little to add except to take exception to the inclusion of gay marriage in his laundry list of scapegoats. People don't vote against gay marriage because they're "bitter." People vote against gay marriage because they're cruel, vicious, loathsome, un-Christian bigots. No other explanation is required or acceptable.

Possibly not much:

A source with close ties to the administration says the mayor wants to remain in public office after his tenure ends on Dec. 31, 2009, and is discussing running for a third term.
...
One tantalizing scenario that has been discussed, according to the source, has Bloomberg asking a new Charter Revision Commission to put a referendum on the ballot amending term limits so that he could serve a third term.
...
Bloomberg said during his January State of the City address that he planned to appoint the new Charter Revision Commission and have it conduct a top-to-bottom review of government. He would appoint all members of the commission and could request the body put the term-limit issue on the November ballot.

Another "source" says the report is nonsense. Let's hope so.

Even if the report is bunk, what is undeniably true is that Bloomberg is as megalomaniacal a moral defective as anyone in current American politics. If he does not seek a third term, or the White House, or the governor's mansion, it would not be due to a lack of appetite for power on his part.

From his first day in office, Bloomberg has proceeded from the dual premises (to him, they're axioms) that: (1) every idea he has is, by definition, brilliant; and (2) everyone who disagrees with him is, by definition, a moron. He has, more brazenly than any currently serving politician I can name, simultaneously climbed the twin summits of "worst activist legislator" and "worst nanny-stater." He has set entirely new standards of hubris, by which every future moral defective New York politician will be measured.

As joyous a day as January 20, 2009, will be, I am at least as excited about January 1, 2010, when Bloomberg will (hopefully) morph from "dedicated public servant" to "dedicated public gadfly."

(I might make this an intermittent feature.)

Today's comment left elsewhere:

So solar is not now "cost-competitive with other forms of electricity"? We're going to spend money to waste money?

How utterly Bloomberg.

Incidentally, the money referenced is federal taxpayer money -- cf., this old post.

There's not much to say, and I said it here:

There is a difference between "bailing out" and "underwriting the orderly liquidation of." The Fed, via JPM, is doing the latter, not the former.

A perfectly reasonable libertarian case can be made that neither undertaking is a legitimate function of government (just as it is not a legitimate function of government to use the tax code or monetary tools to foster home ownership in the first place). But there is nevertheless a substantive difference between the two forms of intervention.

For who require analogies: Rescuing the FSLIC (a government program, incidentally) was "bailing out"; the Resolution Trust Corporation was "underwriting the orderly liquidation of." Saying "this is just like the S&L crisis" achieves nothing (other than to prove one's ignorance about the subject).

It's the chance dangers that I'm afraid of — the senseless, unpredictable dangers of a world falling apart. Consider the physical risks of complex machinery in the hands of blind fools and fear-crazed cowards. ... They'll reach the stage where no day will pass without a major wreck. ... Plane crashes, oil tank explosions, blast-furnace break-outs, high-tension wire electrocutions, subway cave-ins and trestle collapses — they'll see them all.

I think about that passage quite often. Guess I have to think about it some more:


Meanwhile:

"This is an absolute disgrace," [Manhattan Borough President Scott] Stringer said. "We need better inspection and more resources.

Maybe if Mr. Stringer had spent a little less of his resources on trash cans?

Of course, the irony, indeed the tragedy, is that when the government usurps safety and maintenance monitoring from the private sector, and then botches it, the "disgrace" in the politicians' minds is that government doesn't usurp even more.

As I commented elsewhere recently:

Safety certifications as a tragedy of the commons?

Let's review:

--Underwriters Laboratories, Good Housekeeping Seal, Consumer Reports, Moody's, etc.: Private (non-profit in some instances, but private). Not to mention Zagat's, TripAdvisor, U.S. News rankings, etc.

--USDA, FDA, CPSC, etc.: Government.

Are you really sure you want to play this game?

The government has crowded out private safety certification in food, drugs, etc., and you lament that strictly governmental failure as "the consequences of laissez faire"? Wow, just wow.

Do we have (semi-competent at best and lethal at worst) government safety bureaucracies because we have no private services to perform them, or do we have no private services to perform them because we have government safety bureaucracies?

In Part One I explained how modern liberal urban planners, as represented by the New York Times, have completely detached themselves from the underlying reasoning behind, and implications of, a government-run natural monopoly such as mass transit.

Exhibit B, also from the New York Times, demonstrates that "size matters not" —

When Senator Moynihan first proposed replacing the cramped and confusing corridors of Pennsylvania Station, the nation's busiest transit hub, with an elegant, spacious, glass-enclosed station, he envisioned it being built with public dollars.

But in the years since, officials have concluded that government cannot afford the cost — as much as $3 billion to rebuild Penn Station — and that the only way to finance a new station was to entice private developers to do it. In exchange, those developers would be allowed to build, in grand scale, around the new station.

How can it be that "the nation's busiest transit hub" cannot finance its own relocation and expansion? Do economies of scale and the distinction between capital spending and current accounts somehow not apply to a large, long-term project like a train station?

If so, then every business school curriculum, indeed every introductory economics course, is 100% dead wrong.

George Will once mocked the first President Bush's inaugural address in which he lamented that Washington "has the will but not the wallet." Will rightly noted that Washington always has plenty of "wallet" and that the problem is instead usually one of finding the will.

This is that.

The money to rebuild "the nation's busiest transit hub" is staring us in the face: the riders. If there are really so many of them (and there are), then spreading the cost of funding a capital account to build a new Penn Station across their fares should be a relatively straightforward — and not particularly burdensome — question of economics and accounting. We (by which I really mean "they" — the riders) have more than enough wallet.

The deficit is of course in the will — by which I mean political will. The people who ride New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad and Amtrak are, as a group, middle class and therefore politically insulated from such an abominable notion as expecting them to pay for their own train station.

The question of offsetting the cost of a new Penn Station by selling land and development rights around the site to real estate firms (and, if so, then how much development, to whom and by what selection process) are all ancillary to the core question: When and why did expecting those who use a train station to be the ones who pay for it, rather than those who don't use it (not to mention those who don't even live or work near it) become The Impossible Dream?

Consider the following fact:

New York riders pay a considerably higher share of the cost of mass transit than riders in other cities.

A libertarian would say this makes New York a more just (or less unjust) jurisdiction than its peer cities, since even with a natural monopoly such as mass transit (i.e., that might warrant government provision or at least oversight), the principle still endures that those who use a service, and only those who use it, should pay for it. There is no rational basis, under any system of equity or justice (even anti-libertarian ones) to expect New Yorkers who do not use mass transit, let alone taxpayers outside New York, to subsidize those who do.

(Note that I am referring to taxpayers subsidizing the system. Subsidizing the poor — i.e. by providing fare discounts comparable to food stamps or housing vouchers — is a separate question altogether. Who would dare suggest that lower-income subway non-users should be expected to subsidize higher-income users? Yet that is exactly what subsidizing the system as a whole entails.)

Is anyone surprised, meanwhile, that this fact about "who pays what share" comes from the New York Times editorial pages, not as praise but rather as indictment:

The question is how to find all that cash without sticking up riders again. ... Getting money to help fix mass transit is yet another reason why the City Council and state lawmakers should approve congestion pricing before the end of the month — when a deadline to receive more than $350 million in federal funds expires.
...
To finance its capital plan, the authority is also counting on the by-no-means-certain generosity of the city, state and federal governments. And even then there is still a projected $9 billion budget gap. Unless another source of money is found, the M.T.A. chief executive, Lee Sander, may have to further delay some projects, perhaps the next leg of the Second Avenue subway, to pare costs.

Quick, raise unrelated local taxes or else we lose unrelated federal taxes. And hope that we can find more taxpayer teats to suck on down the road subway track. Because, above all else, tapping into that one "other source of money" that is clearly available — fares that reflect true costs — would be utterly unthinkable.

Utterly.

Such is the state of "progressive" urban planning today.

Dear Subaru of New York:

For several weeks now, you have been running, ad nauseum, a series of radio ads touting the superiority of your vehicles during New York winters.

Perhaps your vehicles are indeed superior, in terms of handling in winter conditions, fuel economy, comfort, etc. I neither know nor care.

What I care about is that you end every commercial with the following abomination:

"That's why, in our opinion, Subaru is the official car of New York."

The hypothesis "Subaru is the official car of New York" is a discrete, binary, objective concept. It either is or is not true. There is no room for "opinion." Do, or do not — there is no opine.

"Fuel economy is more important than comfort" is an opinion. "Pink is a stupid color for a car" is an opinion. "People who buy foreign cars are unpatriotic" is an opinion.

"Subaru is the official car of New York" is not, and under no circumstances can ever be, an opinion.

Please change your scripts accordingly. Thank you.

---

Of course, what doubtless is occurring here is that either Subaru of New York, or the City of New York, or both, were unwilling to negotiate a marketing agreement in which Subaru would indeed be declared "the official car of New York." Which at first glance seems odd: it's not like New York City has been unwilling to prostitute itself in this manner in the past — and in a far more controversial context than automobiles.

I wonder whether (indeed I strongly suspect that) Subaru reached out to the city and was rebuked, most likely because it's a foreign manufacturer.* It's no coincidence that almost every police car in America is made in America.

(*Subaru has one assembly plant in Indiana, but it is a Japanese company owned in part by Toyota.)

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Meanwhile:

[A measure] would salute The Colonel's fried chicken as Kentucky's official picnic food.

State Rep. Charles Siler is sponsoring legislation to honor the late Col. Harland Sanders, the Kentuckian who founded the fried chicken chain that now has 11,000 restaurants in more than 80 countries. The bill singles out KFC's "finger lickin' good" original recipe, which Sanders first served in a Corbin restaurant in 1940, for the designation.

The Colonel's fried chicken deserves the title, Siler said, because of the worldwide attention and the economic benefit it has brought to the state. By approving the bill, he said, the legislature would be helping Louisville-based KFC to market the product.

Of course, it is never a proper function of government to help one politically favored company "market the product" (i.e., compete against alternatives). (And KFC's parent company, YUM! Brands, doesn't appear even to have had to pay any rent-seeking to this activist hillbilly legislature. Go figure.)

And what was I just saying about "politically favored"?

The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contends, however, that KFC chickens are abused, even tortured.
...
PETA has been involved in a longstanding battle with KFC, and even began a push two years ago to have a bust of Colonel Sanders removed from the Capitol. Sanders became recognizable worldwide after he began marketing his fried chicken.

No doubt the War on Obesity types will also weigh in (no pun intended); cf. this previous post.

(Via Lowering the Bar.)

You may or may not be familiar with the Sean Bell shooting in New York City. Background here.

The relevant facts for our purposes are that two police detectives are charged with manslaughter (a third is charged with reckless endangerment) in connection to a controversial shooting incident in November 2006.

The officers requested a change in venue based on bias in the local jury pool. This is not unusual. The judge denied the motion, as did an appeals court yesterday.

The defendants have as a result waived their Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. The judge will serve as the trier of fact and will be the one to find the defendants guilty or not guilty.

I won't pretend to know, or be in a position to critique, the defense counsel's reasoning. But I do know the old adage: When the law is on your side, argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither the law nor the facts are on your side, play the race card.

Here the "race card" is Al Sharpton:

"I think that it is stunning that these officers want to do everything but be accountable to the people they serve in Queens," Mr. Sharpton said. "Police should be accountable to the people they serve. It is interesting they would be accountable to people in another venue, but in Queens they do not want to face the people."

What exactly is so "stunning" about wanting a fair trial? What is so stunning about worrying that jurors — pulled from a community rife with racial tensions, exacerbated by media whores like Sharpton — might be more interested in vigilantism than in achieving justice?

Go back to the adage: In a trial where the law is on your side, a bench trial can easily be an intelligent strategy — who is more likely to apply the law correctly: a judge or twelve laypersons? It's only when the law is against you, and you have to rely on persuading that the facts happen to vindicate you, that a jury trial likely makes more sense.

A variation of this heuristic, perhaps not relevant here, goes something like this: If you're innocent and you know it, then you're happy with only one bite of the apple. If you're guilty and you know it, then twelve bites at the apple starts to look mighty attractive.

In any case, only a professional race-baiter like Sharpton could possibly pretend that the sacred right to a jury trial belongs not to the defendant, but to the "community" (as represented by him, of course). Only someone utterly contemptuous of justice could imagine a "right to convict" that transcends pesky notions of guilt or innocence.

Regardless of how the Obama campaign pans out, he will at least have provided this public service: catalyzing the banishment of Sharpton and his scurrilous ilk to the dustbin of history.

City housing officials acknowledge that they have no hard data on the numbers of cases of harassment between landlords and tenants.

Which, of course, does not stop them from seeking to intervene in what the Washington Post histrionically describes as landlord-tenant "wars" --

"We want to give tenants the power of the law to fight intimidation," said Councilman Daniel Garodnick, one of the sponsors of the first bill, Introduction 627, which has the backing of 34 of the [New York City] council's 51 members. The issue is so contentious that Councilwoman Maria Baez of the Bronx, who introduced the rival bill, Introduction 638, to protect landlords, withdrew her support for it after an angry protest by housing activists outside her office.
...
Representatives of landlords say incidents of harassment are rare. They say that a new law is unnecessary because 10 existing laws deal with similar issues and that the state housing agency has been hearing harassment cases for years.

Are all landlords saints? Surely not. But I wonder which is the more ubiquitous problem: landlords illegally harassing tenants or tenants not paying rent on time (or otherwise violating leases)?

And keep in mind that a significant, perhaps overwhelming, proportion of these harassment allegations (including the false ones that no doubt exist) are in reference to rent-regulated apartments. When the government, by negating property rights, creates a powerful incentive to evict a tenant paying a minuscule fraction of a market rent (the eviction allows the rent to rise at least a bit with the next tenant), then who can claim to be surprised when a handful of landlords cross a line that the government itself created?

Does that excuse harassment or other illegal conduct? No -- two wrongs do not make a right. But let's at least acknowledge that the precedent wrong exists -- and persists -- as a matter of public policy.

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Meanwhile:

The workers say their wages are trailing inflation and don't reflect the booming value of the office buildings where they clean, run elevators and staff the doors.

The backstory is a pending strike by the Service Employees International Union against the Realty Advisory Board, which represents many, perhaps most, commercial office buildings in Manhattan.

The part of that sentence that is most fascinating (i.e., most frustrating) is the citation to "the booming value of the office buildings." Why should the underlying value of the property matter to the value of the services a janitor provides? Since when do employees have an underlying claim to the value of the property on which they work?

This obfuscation -- best reflected in the insolent attempt by some malcontents to replace the word "stockholder" with the gobbledygook term "stakeholder" -- blanks out the fact that property values reflect entrepreneurship and risk-taking, the return to the factor of production called "ownership," just as wages are the return to the factor of production called "labor."

If workers want to share in the "booming value" of office buildings, then let their unions take equity stakes in the properties. Earn a share in the reward by taking on a share of the risk. After all, wasn't the end goal of socialism always for workers to own the means of production?

Maybe they should actually give it a try sometime -- though they may be surprised by what they learn.