What's wrong with Democracy?

Government is a monopoly of legitimized violence. Theoretically, democracy opens potential membership in the government to all people, and all people share the same prospects to decide how its violence will be used, for whose benefit and at whose expense. But *actual* political power is a scarce good; it cannot be possessed equally and by everyone at the same time and in the same respect.

For this reason, tangible membership in government is restricted to “elected” officials (a very small percentage) and agents appointed/hired by these officials, who constitute the bulk of the state apparatus. And then there are the “outsiders” that move in and out of this thin membrane; donors, developers, special interest groups, task force groups, volunteers, low level government employees, unions, citizen action groups etc. In almost all cases, what these “outsiders” have in common is their membership to a particular group, a prerequisite for establishing political connections. Outside this, of course, are the vast majority of people, who have no direct influence over government, who are busy earning a living and have no inclinations or resources to seek active membership in one of these groups.

So I think the real question is not how the government should actually go about giving everyone a fair share and equal voice in government, because it was no designed for that purpose. If you don’t like the way your dog wags its tail, you get another dog. The real question, I think, is how government effectively privatizes the proceeds of violence while giving everyone else just enough of a stake in that violence to retain their passive resignation.

Colborne Street: Demolition and Mad Dreamers

The fencing is up, and demolition crews have begun the process of flattening 41 buildings, most of them archeological remnants of an age of spontaneous commercial development, now long gone. Businesses were evicted, landowners have been dispossessed, and over 60 people have been forced from their homes. We are told this was necessary because the buildings, in various stages of disrepair, stand in the way of “core revitalization”, a smart-growth expression commonly used among city consultants, experts and civil engineering graduates, who are anointed by politicians to centrally plan city growth, with tax dollars as fertilizer, of course. The problem is that the city government has created a garden of weeds, one that it now prepares to mow down.

The conventional debate over demolition versus restoration both share the same central flaw; the idea that commercial growth and expansion in this section of the city have failed, despite decades of tax funded stimulus initiatives and a “hands-off” policy on the part of city planners. The contradiction in this rationale should be obvious, but a thorough debunking could very well reveal a systematic eradication of the private sector from the downtown, the legacy of inept central management.

The buildings themselves are old, but the reason they represented an unprofitable liability to their owners had little to do with their age. Older buildings were made to last, unlike the eco-centric construction standards of todays box stores and subsidized housing. The south side was transformed into an urban wasteland, not by private negligence, but by city-wide building maintenance codes which prevented productive use, by rent control and “tenant protection” laws that did more to guarantee high vacancy rates and minimal investment, than to protect tenants and provide affordable, livable apartments. Zoning bylaws and other regulations placed crippling restrictions on mixed use of the land and discouraged investment and the risk of capital. In the end it should surprise no one if the owners anticipated, welcomed and even positioned themselves financially for expropriation proceedings, where they could finally unload the properties onto the taxpayer. The terms of settlement kept behind closed doors, the private burden became a public debt.

In fact, there has been no meaningful private sector in the downtown for many years. A walk downtown can easily confirm how the expansion of the public sector and it’s insider network of business-government partnerships have crowded out most of the private investment and commerce that characterized the downtown square and surrounding area for centuries. Even the highly praised “university expansion” is an indirect growth of the public sector. Millions have been spent to retrofit the downtown, while the universities expand their real estate holdings by outbidding private developers with revenues largely generated by government funding. And after a decade, no sustained expansion of private, commercial development has occurred in the downtown as a result.

When the buildings come down, anyone standing on that section of Colborne Street will see two other examples of failed government management. The first is a building meant for a large telecommunications complex, now an oversized, state-run gambling parlor. The other is a crumbling parking garage intended for the shoppers and venders of a mall, now largely vacant.

The expropriation, demolition and rebuilding of the south side of Colborne Street, is more than a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to developers, consultants and politically connected corporate interests. It is also an attempt to erase decades of inept city council decisions and public initiatives. The real lingering embarrassment of the South Side of Colborne was that it could not be grafted onto the “new community” synthesized by city planners. When they are gone, gone also is a reminder of a living, breathing community that was swept away by mad dreamers who wanted the city shaped in their image, not that of the people who lived and worked in it. This is the real heritage we have surrendered.