Saturday, February 26, 2011

Preservationists Are At It again..

The praise showered on the Mayor and councilors for their decision to prohibit the demolition of the current building on 105 Wellington St. is a curious departure from the critical stance Mary O’Grady usually takes with the hubris of city hall (“Vote to Retain 105 Wellington”, Feb 26). Apparently, the “needs of the community” do not include a respect for property rights, due process and the right of free trade.

What kind of community can we expect where individual property owners are tools of central planning, and the use and disposal of their land is determined by civil engineering graduates with no personal stake in maximizing its productive capacity? Let’s freely concede that a large body of land use planning and regulation already severely restrict how a person can use or dispose of what is rightfully his or hers. In the drive to rezone a property because of its age or history we see a natural progression towards a kind of back door expropriation on any pretense a person can come up with.

We also see what is wrong with the central planning perspective, one that is less concerned with what people do and how they live their lives, and more concerned with what appointed experts and consultants decide they must do, whether they like it or not. Instead of small mixed use communities with their own residential and commercial cores, we are given segregated regions; one for shopping, one for working, etc. The natural and organic growth of cities is replaced with synthetic management by an army of bureaucrats acting on behalf of a coalition of developers, consultants and other special interest groups.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Contraband Tobacco is Tax Resistance

You would think that anyone who appreciates Dennis Leary's wit on the absurdity of social engineering could also appreciate the wider point about the ultimate futility of cigarette prohibition. But instead, in lockstep with industrial tobacco and the retail lobby, Kalvin Reid ("Serious tobacco plan should start with illegal cigarettes" – Jan 4) asserts that "We have a responsibility as a society to create healthy communities, and eradicating smoking is a big part of that." He promotes an initiative to save us from everything from lung cancer to yellow fingers. What about personal liberty and the responsibility of parents to monitor their own children?

In case Mr. Reid hasn't realized, imposing punitive costs on the consumption of tobacco is precisely what has made homebrewed cigarettes and the underground trade so lucrative. Before reinvigorating the crusade against smokers and their bootleggers, it might be worth considering that the black market actually provides an effective check against the prohibitionists, and not the other way around. It is the black market that withholds at least some private wealth from government and its corporate clients. As a form of tax resistance, the trade in contraband cigarettes is the only effective restraint on tax increases for an ostensibly legal product. The tail is wagging the dog.