Excellent. As a sidenote, I do wonder why police officers are required to stand by whenever a hole is being dug in Massachusetts. It seems like holes get dug perfectly fine in other places without that level of surveillance.
I think the arguments for this, generally made by the police unions, boil down to something like: 1) our traffic is more hairy than anyone else's, so it needs actual trained traffic professionals to deal with 2) it puts policemen out in public during their off-duty time so that they are more accessible when something else nearby could use a cop 3) policing is a hard thankless dangerous job and they aren't paid enough, so it's good to cause them to be paid more than their salary with all this bonus work that someone else pays for.
Certainly, back in Albany, when I worked on a gas crew, if we decided there was a gas leak somewhere under the street, we didn't even bother to tell the police. We just dug up the street and had summer interns (IE me) start directing traffic while the gas mechanics fixed it. Quite cheap.
I think they boil down to something like "Because it gives us money, and we have the clout to make it happen, and if you don't do it and something goes wrong we'll make sure you get the pants sued off of you."
Which I guess is your point 3 with slightly less sugar.
That said, I'm never quite sure what the sensible response to it is on a small scale. I mean, yes, it's absurd to subsidize tobacco farmers and tax cigarettes; if you want to reduce tobacco consumption, don't subsidize tobacco farmers. Absolutely. But if the question on the table is "tax cigarettes or don't," and you want to reduce tobacco consumption... (shrug). You know how it is.
Also, a tangent... The thing that makes (our) government evil is that it enables a majority to impose their will on a minority. If I want to build a shed on my land that I own, my neighbors can tell me 'no' without buying my land or otherwise honestly acquiring property rights.Huh
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I mean, I agree with your description of government, but describing it as evil in consequence of that strikes me as being an awful lot like saying that government is good because it permits people to breathe.
Maybe I'm just being dim, but it doesn't seem at all like that to me. Permitting people to breathe is I suppose technically a function performed by every entity in the world, from my town government to theater companies to the Federated Apostolic Church of Southeast Nauru, but it really doesn't exemplify the typical activity of government
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As an aside, the reason I keep putting "affordable housing" in quotes is because there's this odd unstated assumption that somehow housing is some sort of special good that doesn't obey the same economic rules as food or clothing or flamingo-shaped lawn ornaments.Three words: Location, location, location
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Yeah, the very basic 14.01 sort of model does assume that the good in question is more like a lawn ornament or a bushel of wheat, but product differentiation or imperfect substitution are not especially esoteric concepts. I could drone on about the specifics of the models if you really care, but capped supply or differentiated products don't present intractable problems; the supply curve just goes vertical when you hit the maximum, and you can model partial substitutes as a collection of linked markets
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That first scenario doesn't happen much around here; some businesses (the kind that don't go in office parks) impose more costs (e.g., traffic costs) that residential units don't, and if your utilities are operating near capacity then more businesses can force expensive upgrades. It doesn't help if the electorate skews so far left that there's a reliable constituency invariably opposed to anything that benefits for-profit entities.
The second scenario, though, is definitely a factor. The use of laws like your example is what motivated Section 40B in the first place, as they are indeed a very effective way of keeping the unwashed hordes out of your town. The fight in which this ballot question is just the most recent move has been between towns trying to keep poor people out vs. the state trying to make everyone take their share of poor people. Also on the side of the towns are the generically anti-development Luddites who oppose any mechanism for circumventing rules that could prevent development.
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1) our traffic is more hairy than anyone else's, so it needs actual trained traffic professionals to deal with
2) it puts policemen out in public during their off-duty time so that they are more accessible when something else nearby could use a cop
3) policing is a hard thankless dangerous job and they aren't paid enough, so it's good to cause them to be paid more than their salary with all this bonus work that someone else pays for.
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I think they boil down to something like "Because it gives us money, and we have the clout to make it happen, and if you don't do it and something goes wrong we'll make sure you get the pants sued off of you."
Which I guess is your point 3 with slightly less sugar.
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That said, I'm never quite sure what the sensible response to it is on a small scale. I mean, yes, it's absurd to subsidize tobacco farmers and tax cigarettes; if you want to reduce tobacco consumption, don't subsidize tobacco farmers. Absolutely. But if the question on the table is "tax cigarettes or don't," and you want to reduce tobacco consumption... (shrug). You know how it is.
Also, a tangent... The thing that makes (our) government evil is that it enables a majority to impose their will on a minority. If I want to build a shed on my land that I own, my neighbors can tell me 'no' without buying my land or otherwise honestly acquiring property rights.Huh ( ... )
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I mean, I agree with your description of government, but describing it as evil in consequence of that strikes me as being an awful lot like saying that government is good because it permits people to breathe.
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The second scenario, though, is definitely a factor. The use of laws like your example is what motivated Section 40B in the first place, as they are indeed a very effective way of keeping the unwashed hordes out of your town. The fight in which this ballot question is just the most recent move has been between towns trying to keep poor people out vs. the state trying to make everyone take their share of poor people. Also on the side of the towns are the generically anti-development Luddites who oppose any mechanism for circumventing rules that could prevent development.
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