Carson’s Rejoinder to Kuznicki

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7 Responses

  1. Francis says:

    Interesting response. A little anti-democratic, though. Zoning laws, frex, are tremendously popular (how many big cities don’t have them), and are set at the local level. How many people would vote for a state constitutional amendment that would permanently deprive themselves of the ability to adopt land use laws?Report

    • Dog's New Clothes in reply to Francis says:

      Francis,

      “A little anti-democratic, though”

      I don’t think we should be surprised that a research associate at the Center for a Stateless Society is “anti-democratic”! As for the likelihood of the privileged willingly ceding their privileges, well, yeah, go figure.

      Great article, Kevin.Report

  2. quasibill says:

    Just to clarify a common mistake – zoning laws are absolutely NOT the result of bottom-up, localized political action. The push started at the national level and resulted in the states creating municipal authorities (almost always distinct from the already existing local authorities) to enact and enforce planning and zoning regulations. And the content of the ordinances, while technically passed at a local level, is very heavily regulated by state statutory and even common law and ultimately by constitutional law.

    That said, out of context, they tend to be popular, as people will focus on the issues that would have been a common law nuisance anyway. But almost everyone can point to more than a few local zoning ordinances they find utterly ridiculous. I think that if you can get past soundbite level debate, you can easily convince most people that zoning ordinances are a net negative. As one local practitioner said to appreciative nods: “the only people zoning ordinances stop are the poor and middle class.”Report

  3. I am afraid it is a mistake for mutualists or the like to get involved in the labor theory of value. Hodgskin and other classical laborists used the labor theory of property, which is a horse of an entirely different color.Report

  4. Bor says:

    Can and will anyone parse (dumb down) the above “rejoinder” for those, who, like me, find it difficult to understand uber-abstractions?Report

  5. Derek Ryan Strong says:

    Echoing David, I think mutualists need to more clearly distinguish between value theory, property theory, and price theory. Of course, these are not necessarily mutually exclusive.Report