He states unabashedly, "I'm for higher taxes, income redistribution, universal health care, cap and trade, and so on." Nevertheless, he says, "here I am, largely making the case for deregulation."
He isn't alone. People identifying as urban progressives increasingly find their own goals stymied by laws and regulations, and they're demanding that these restrictions be overturned or limited. Unexpectedly. But only for certain, progressive issues.
In other areas of city policy, though ‐ typically, when they don't hold a personal stake ‐ they often push aggressively for ever more regulations and a more intrusive government. Call it a libertarianism of convenience. What these part-time freedom lovers don't understand is that, absent a wider culture of liberty, calls for selective liberty will probably go unheeded.
Writing in The Atlantic's CityLab, and sounding more like Milton Friedman than a traditional left-liberal, Hertz noted that overuse of zoning had produced a pattern of "micro-regulations of the urban space, in which the size, function, number of windows, orientation, number of inhabitants, number of parking spaces, color, lawn space and a million other details of every single building in the city came to be a legitimate state interest." Yep. That's exactly what you wanted. The only problem is, it ain't your particular view of the world.
Nowhere has the liberal big-government, pro-regulation consensus weakened more noticeably than in housing policy, especially in New York and San Francisco, where housing prices have soared. Zoning ‐ particularly rules limiting density ‐ has become a regular target.
Left urbanists also decry zoning that requires city developers or businesses to include a minimum number of parking spaces before moving forward on a building or an opening, rather than leaving that decision to the market. Streetsblog decried parking space mandates as "absurd." The Walking Bostonian commented on high minimum parking requirements at, of all places, bars: "It's almost as if there's a kind of sickness which seems to get into city planners' heads whenever the topic of parking comes up, and it causes all common sense to fly out the window." You mean your particular version of common sense.
The urban left's sudden love for libertarian ideas goes beyond housing. When hip food establishments run into red tape, progressives and the press jump into gear. For example, the regulatory travails of Chicago's Logan Square Kitchen attracted a series of articles in the alt-weekly Chicago Reader, which observed: "The minutiae of this licensing confusion are mind numbing." The food industry is ready for deregulation, too, many on the left argue. De-regulation? Or re-regulation?
Urban progressives' enthusiasm for deregulation proves to be highly selective, however. Indeed, in many policy areas, they're pushing for greatly expanded regulation. This is often true on the economic front. Advocates have pushed hard for local minimum-wage hikes in cities from Chicago to Seattle, for instance, and they try to block chain retailers from expanding in many neighborhoods. One set of regulations for me and another set of regulations for thee, as P2K is fond of saying.
Their inconsistency can lead liberals to seek more regulations in sectors of city life that they've elsewhere said should be deregulated. While they've assailed density limits, height restrictions, minimum unit sizes, and other housing regulations, for example, they have celebrated New York's access-to-buildings law, which mandates that commercial buildings allow bicycles on freight elevators. Inconsistency? Among liberals? Similarly, while car parking minimums have drawn fire, sites like Greater Greater Washington have simultaneously embraced bicycle parking minimums in the District of Columbia. And progressives' call for food freedom abruptly reverses itself when trans fats, genetically modified foods or large sugary drinks are in question ‐ they think all should be banned or strictly regulated. They also support the micromanagement of school lunches and requiring restaurant menus to list calorie counts. Why ... this suggests liberals are petty, childish, self-centered tryants who want it their very own way.
These contortions reach absurdity with smoking policy. On the one hand, the left champions the legalization of marijuana in states like Colorado, Washington and Oregon. Legalized pot is variously said to be a great source of tax revenue, jobs and even a key part of an emerging startup culture. Yet while smoking weed is encouraged, smoking tobacco remains Public Enemy No. 1, with progressive cities piling on further restrictions to this already highly taxed and regulated activity.
What explains these contradictions? A charitable explanation is that urban progressives ‐ typically on the younger side ‐ are just beginning to experience how excessive regulations can suffocate life in the city. After getting entangled in bureaucracy in the District of Columbia when he wanted to rent his condo (legally), Yglesias grumbled in Slate that "I've been to three offices, filed five forms, spent $200, lost a day of work ‐ and I'm not even close to getting the simple license I need." Such red tape, he added, is "a large and needless deterrent to the formation of the humble workaday firms that for many people are a path to autonomy and prosperity." It appears that he'd never before understood what small businesses go through to operate in D.C. or in many other American cities. Why should anyone be surprised the POTUS wants more regulation?
But it's hard to avoid thinking, too, that some of the inconsistency reflects elite biases. The things that liberal-minded city residents like and want to do ‐ eat from hip food trucks, smoke dope and other "bourgeois bohemian" pursuits ‐ should be left as free as possible, consequences be damned (raw-milk advocates play down the nearly 1,000 cases of illnesses caused by it from 2007 through 2012). Those that they consider déclassé ‐ Big Gulps, Marlboro Lights, McDonald's ‐ should be restricted or even shut down. It's regulation for thee but not for me. I think I said that a while back.
Posted by: Bobby ||
05/24/2015 13:40 ||
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#1
*happy sigh*. I do enjoy when Bobby gets his fisking dander up.
National Review was the prototype for conservative commentary when it was founded by the great William F. Buckley back in 1955, and 60 years later it has managed to stay near the top of an ever-expanding digital pack of bloggers and pundits.
Obviously such a run could only happen if the first principles of such an institution were zealously guarded, and winsomely communicated by writers and thinkers uniquely unafraid to follow in Buckley's giant footsteps and tell it like it is.
Unfortunately, it appears those first principles aren't going to be as zealously guarded, let alone defended, as they once were. In a column written by managing editor Jason Lee Steorts, National Review apparently decided they didn't want social conservatives -- the third and largest leg of Reagan's famed three-legged stool -- to read their stuff anymore when they full-throated embraced the Rainbow Jihad.
And just like that a legacy marked by staring down Marxists both foreign and domestic is no more. National Review has been surrendered to America's Cultural Marxists. So much for the legacy founded by the man who gave us God and Man at Yale.
That takes some serious selling out.
This isn’t totally out of left field, though. Steorts began showing his true colors back in 2013 when he ran Mark Steyn – arguably one of the most courageous and entertaining conservatives of the last decade – out of National Review for daring to call the agenda of the Rainbow Jihad into question.
That agenda was still in its ‘How is my gay marriage going to affect your life?’ stage, but Steyn saw through the scam and said as much in his typically biting yet congenial way. Less than two years later we know Steyn to be a prophet, as businesses great and small are now forced to genuflect at the altar of homosexual hubris and pagan courts gone wild.
#3
....Well, I'd listen to Steyn read and comment on the Yellow Pages. NR...haven't read them in years.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
05/24/2015 8:41 Comments ||
Top||
#4
It's the lefty intention and also a natural progression, it seems, for media to be captured by progressives. NR is going, Fox is going, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Breitbart under seige soon. It takes a strong editor to hold it off. Buckley RIP.
[Dawn] To many, Tahir, Saad, Azfar and Nasir may appear new hard boy characters. But, profiles and ambitions of similar characters have been highlighted many times in the recent past.
The confessions made by these detainees shocked many, particularly those who believed that forces of Evil exist only in the lower classes and in unusual circumstances.
Educated and well-off, as their profiles suggest, these forces of Evil were reportedly involved in the recent wave of attacks in Bloody Karachi
Continued on Page 49
[SultanKnish] Obama can't defeat ISIS with soft power, though ISIS could beat him with soft power assuming its Caliph ever decided to agree to sit down at a table with John Kerry without beheading him. Iran has picked up billions in sanctions relief and the right to take over Yemen and raid ships in international waters in the Persian Gulf just for agreeing to listen to Kerry talk for an hour.
And that might be a fair exchange.
An hour? I'd need more then Yemen...
As bad as having your capital or ship seized by Iran is, listening to John Kerry talk is even worse.
If ISIS were to agree to a deal, it could pick up Baghdad and Damascus just in exchange for showing up. All it would have to do is find a Jihadi who hasn't chopped off any heads on camera to present as a moderate. The administration and its media operatives would accuse anyone who disagreed of aiding the ISIS hardliners at the expense of the ISIS moderates who also represent the hardliners.
If Obama did that, he would at least lose in a way that he understands; instead of in a way he doesn't.
...The Islamic State isn't unnatural. Its strength comes from being an organic part of the region, the religion and its culture. Its Arab enemies have performed so poorly fighting it because their institutions, their governments and their armies are unstable imitations of Western entities.
The United States can't make the Iraqi army work because Iraq isn't America. The assumptions about meritocracy, loyalty to comrades and initiative that make our military work are foreign in Iraq and Afghanistan where the fundamental unit is not the nation, but the tribe, clan and group.
Iraq and Syria aren't countries; they're collections of quarreling tribes that were forced into an arrangement that included the forms of Western government without any of the substance. When the Europeans left, kingdoms quickly became military juntas. Now the juntas are fighting for survival against Islamic insurgencies that are striving to return the region to what it was in the days of Mohammed.
ISIS is the ultimate decolonization effort. It's what the left claims that it wants. But real decolonization means stripping away everything the Europeans brought, including constitutions, labor unions and elections. The cities that ISIS controls have been truly decolonized. There is no music, there are no rights, slavery is back and every decision is made by a cleric with a militia or a militia leader with a cleric.
That's Mohammed. It's the Koran. It's Islam.
...We can't beat ISIS with Islam and we can't fight for freedom while endorsing constitutions that make Sharia law into the law of the land in places like Iraq and Libya.
We don't only need to defeat ISIS. We must defeat the culture that makes ISIS inevitable Lets start by making first-cousin marriages a capital offence---not for the young people involved, but for their elders for arranging these.
#5
They'd rather describe the biggest problem today as "climate change." "Climate change" doesn't argue or fight back or kill (although the lefties would argue that). There's no cost to defining the enemy as climate change rather than ISIS. Washington is skilled at jousting with windmills and collecting huge amounts of taxpayers money to joust.
[Rudaw] Three male Yezidi children who had been kidnapped by ISIS have reportedly been killed in battle while fighting for the bad boy group, according to a well-placed source.
The need for fresh blood is so enormous, ISIS has recently started forcefully recruiting high school students in its captured territories.
The alleged deaths underscore an overlooked aspect of ISIS' capture of over 5,000 Kurdish Yezidi men, women and kiddies since August - a horrific story that has focused mostly on the fate of the women and girls who were taken by ISIS fighters as sex slaves and servants.
The report of the killing of these child soldiers begs the question: what happened to the boys?
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: trailing wife ||
05/24/2015 00:00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
He isn't alone. People identifying as urban progressives increasingly find their own goals stymied by laws and regulations, and they're demanding that these restrictions be overturned or limited. 
Similarly, while car parking minimums have drawn fire, sites like Greater Greater Washington have simultaneously embraced bicycle parking minimums in the District of Columbia. And progressives' call for food freedom abruptly reverses itself when trans fats, genetically modified foods or large sugary drinks are in question ‐ they think all should be banned or strictly regulated. They also support the micromanagement of school lunches and requiring restaurant menus to list calorie counts.
National Review was the prototype for conservative commentary when it was founded by the great William F. Buckley back in 1955, and 60 years later it has managed to stay near the top of an ever-expanding digital pack of bloggers and pundits.
