• christian2017
    1.4k
    Many Libertarians make a good argument about why we should have a completely free market but what some of them overlook is that many zoning laws are also a hindrance to the notion of "maximum freedom from government intervention". Alot of poor people would be self sufficient working only one job if zoning laws were significantly reduced. Many people who own houses are opposed to reducing zoning laws because it lowers the value of their house. The question is do we continue to impose heavily on the tax payer through subsidies or do we have a free market and let peoples home equity suffer. I find the concept that the poor just aren't working hard enough to be completely unfound.
  • ssu
    7.9k
    Zoning laws might seem as a hindrace, but then on another hand, there's positive effects too.

    First and foremost, for many real estate developers the prime and only interest is to get as much as money from the real estate as possible. They have absolutely no need to think about others, especially after they have sold the land and gotten their money. Now theoretically you might assume that "maximum freedom" would be the best case, but having absolutely no zoning laws can have extremely bad effects too.

    Assume you buy real estate that has been a farming land with picturesque scenery and good traffic connections and build a one family house there. Yet next a real estate developer buys a land to your east and builds a huge mall. Even if now you have services close by, being next to a huge ugly parking lot next to your house lowers the value of your home and real estate. Yet after that another real estate developer builds a toxic waste disposal dump on the other side of your house. The smell of the waste dump is awful and nobody comes to the mall and the place goes belly up. Now nobody will buy your house and you have lost a fortune. Who would live between a waste dump and a deserted mall?

    Having no zoning laws simply means that you don't have ANY kind of city planning. And when you have no city planning, it can mean that nobody is willing to take risks as there is the risk of that waste dump or that everybody tries to build a mall on their land and in the end nobody is willing to do that. Cities that have grown without city planning usually lack an effective and coordinated transport system, good roads.

    Hence just to think that zoning laws are a hindrance is naive. The real world is very complex.and it is stupid to view these issues with a broad universal political ideology.
  • christian2017
    1.4k


    absolutely.

    My point is to have a completely free market as many Libertarians ask for, society also has to acknowledge there are certain government restrictions that inhibit the poor from being self sufficient. If a poor person is stuck on this earth for another 50 years, she would probably rather live in a shed or perhaps even house like a house in Haiti (card board box) then work 2 or 3 jobs to pay a land lord their high rent. Libertarians need to understand that there are give and takes to having a society that consists of a completely free market. Most of the poor in my area either work hard or work entirely too hard. A family that sees their parents on a daily basis is in general better off. Families are very important to human health and well being.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    Sure, neat idea, keep the poor near the factories, the wealthy can have the trees.

    Fucksake.
  • christian2017
    1.4k


    i don't entirely disagree with you. I think alot of problems in society can be solved with more general mutual respect as well as for a lack of better phrase "more loving kindness"
  • Banno
    23.1k
    Then it seems to me your OP is incongruous; unless you were pointing out that zoning laws are a neat way of demonstrating the poverty of the free market.
  • christian2017
    1.4k


    i do think people need to look past "poor people are lazy" as the reason for a bad economy. The poor person who works 5 8 hour days, the poor person who works 6 8 hour days and the poor person who consisently goes way beyond 7 straight days of work (usually no consistency in days off and alot of fluctuation from week to week). These 3 people have drastically different experiences. I think to expect a poor person to work 5 or 6 8 hour days to bring some sort of social responsibilty badge to their existence is highly plausible. That being said, many people who don't consistently work 7 or more days a week, do not understand the drastic difference between working one less day then the lenghth of the week and on the other end working the full length of the week and thus usually not having a day off. I've met people who worked 300 days in a row due to this. With drastically reduced zoning laws, the conservative can check off the box that he/she is not being overtaxed and at the same time the poor person (living in her modestly furnished shed) can not constantly hate whatever god or gods that happen to be out there due to the unjust laws that used to be in our society. As you are probably aware, to have a free market really is a two way street.
  • ssu
    7.9k
    If a poor person is stuck on this earth for another 50 years, she would probably rather live in a shed or perhaps even house like a house in Haiti (card board box) then work 2 or 3 jobs to pay a land lord their high rent.christian2017
    This is actually a sign of a deep failure of one extremely important market: the finance market, the banking sector. If poor people cannot get a loan to buy real estate that at least will preserve real value, the above described poverty will continue. People won't get more prosperous: they will pay rent all they lives and die poor. They will be lousy consumers, which means aggregate demand is small in the society. This can easily happen when there aren't all those important institutions at place that make it worth wile (less risky) for lenders to lend to ordinary people without loan-shark interest rates.

    I would say libertarians ought to at first understand that if they truly desire liberty and freedom, they will then have to tolerate people that aren't libertarians and simply oppose them. It's great if a lot of things are indeed liberal (in the classic meaning), but likely if you have a democracy, you will have opposing voices too. You likely will have collective left leaning programs. Typically things like health care, social security, some kind of welfare net are things people like. They create social cohesion. If the most libertarian country is Switzerland, it has it's share of the welfare state.

    What libertarians don't like to hear is that the most successful countries even if very liberal, are basically mixed economies. Many times libertarians are ideological zealots, who push ideology before reality.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    That approach strikes me as deplorable...
  • christian2017
    1.4k


    When you say approach, do you mean my last post? What in particular is the most deplorable and we can start from there. If you say the whole thing there won't be much of a discussion unless we systematically went from line to line.

    Or were you referring to something else?

    Considering money is in some way a legal fiction (Noah Harrari), i'm not entirely sure its wrong to create slightly more government jobs with extra printed money, and thus give the economy a boost. Wants the economy gets a boost, perhaps it would be a catalyst to create an economy like the one we had in the 90s.

    However i do feel its necessary to find ways to help the poor without raising taxes or printing money, because some people in America are willing to get violent over their beliefs.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    ? What in particular is the most deplorablechristian2017

    i do feel its necessary to find ways to help the poor without raising taxes or printing money, because some people in America are willing to get violent over their beliefs.christian2017
  • christian2017
    1.4k


    I'm making a comment about the nature of many people in my area as well as country. Considering most people in my area have high paying jobs working for the military industrial complex, although they may complain about taxes, i don't feel they have the right to get violent over the issue.

    Perhaps i didn't state what i was saying correctly and there we had the disagreement.
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