9 Responses to “Government at Work”

1. Soviet Onion Says:
   May 30th, 2009 at 6:39 pm

   tee hee

2. Rad Geek Says:
   June 4th, 2009 at 1:41 pm

   Thanks for the link.

   Note that both of these tyrannies primarily involve local and state government.

   Do they?

   The Interstate Highway System and the earlier U.S. highway system, for example, certainly involve state and local government. But I’d hardly say that the federal government was only “secondarily” involved in them.

   Similarly, police brutality has existed always and everywhere where there are unaccountable government police, regardless of what level of government was involved in running them. But the specific phenomenon of increasing numbers of police on city streets and increasing militarization of the arsenal, training, personnel, and attitudes of police, over the past 40 years or so, has largely been the result of locally-administered federally coordinated programs (e.g. the War on Drugs and targeted repression of political “extremism”), and it has been bankrolled by the federal government to the tune of billions if not trillions of dollars in domestic nation-building exercises like “homeland security” grants, federal “community policing” initiatives, free federal training, subsidized military equipment sales, etc. (Where would small-town cops in South Carolina be getting a tank, if it weren’t for federal grants and subsidized federal sales of U.S. military equipment to local cops?)

   These aren’t examples of local tyranny where the Feds are just standing by watching, or where the Feds could even potentially be enlisted as a countervailing force.The Feds are actively complicit and have been one of the primary forces in making things as bad as they are.

   Just as peaceful secession would actually have profoundly destabilized slavery in the Southern states — because it meant the end of Fugitive Slave laws, the moving of the line of freedom from the Canadian border to the Mason-Dixon, and the removal of Northern military resources from the effort to suppress Southern slave revolts and John Brown raids — I think there’s good reason to think that, ceteris paribus, without the Feds at their back, the local Growth Machine types and the local paramilitary constabulary would be in a much more precarious position than they are now.

   Of course, this is no reason to cry about “federalism” or “judicial activism” or some other conservative claptrap when looking at the handful of specific cases where the Feds do act against locally-administered tyrannizing (say, Miranda, or the recent Gant decision). But if we’re trying to figure out how things would “work out” on balance, then we do have to look at how much these forms of tyrannizing are incited, coordinated, and bankrolled from the center.

3. DarianW Says:
   June 4th, 2009 at 4:22 pm

   The feds are certainly a driving force, but if federalism and local control protected freedom, then local elected officials would say “we don’t want your war or your money – we’re protecting our citizens’ freedom.”

   Of course that alone doesn’t justify my use of “primarily”. But I am considering that there are numerous more zoning boards and local blue-light thugs than there are senators or DHS agents. And these are the people who primarily enforce the drug war and neighborhood control. In the rare cases when localities or states revoke a federal tyranny (like medical marijuana for example) they do little to keep the feds from enforcing it.

   And I think that interstate highways are secondary to zoning laws, redevelopment, business regulations, and public planning tyrannies in creating the business-home segregation that exists today.

   The point I was making was of course not that the federal government is innocent in these matters, but that state and local governments are all too eager to get in on central planning and police state tyranny. It is hard to say which level of government is least bad, but in the cases the post discusses I think primary responsibility goes to the local and state levels.

4. DarianW Says:
   June 4th, 2009 at 4:24 pm

   Perhaps “sprawl-suburbia-stripmall landscape” is a better label than business-home segregation.

5. quasibill Says:
   June 5th, 2009 at 7:36 am

   Sometimes, learning the facts about the history of certain institutions helps when commenting on them:

   “The Federal Government actively sponsored planning at the municipal level and in the 1920′s the Department of Commerce published the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act. … The standard State Zoning Enabling Act was the pattern followed by most states where the state legislatures vested local governments with the power to adopt and enforce zoning ordinances to further the comprehensive plan for development of the community.”

   http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/200/documents/A%20Brief%20History%20of%20Zoning.doc

   Notice how the impetus flowed from the top down. Furthermore, even a cursory review of most zoning laws reveals that they are created by state legislators, who then delegate the power to local boards (of course, with all kinds of strings attached, that allow the sophisticated to game the system). This is most definitely *not* a case of a locally created tyranny that just happened to spread. As usual, it is a case of a national agenda, pushed downwards on state and local governments who were only too happy to use the excuse to increase their power.

   Not that I’m defending state governments in any way, and not really local governments either – but if you’re going to assign blame for zoning laws, well, your analysis is entirely backwards. At best, it is example of state level tyranny that followed an agenda that started at the federal level, and both the state and feds were able to hide what they were doing by vesting some vague enforcement power at the local level while attaching specific strings that made sure the “right” people could avoid enforcement (it’s similar, but not the same as, what they did with public schooling). Think of it as smart marketing by the national elite.

6. DarianW Says:
   June 5th, 2009 at 7:44 am

   quasibill,

   Thank you for the historical background.

   However, regardless of who started the regulations, the fact is that local and state governments are the ones who currently make and enforce them. Should the federal government dissolve tomorrow, the regulations would continue being made and enforced (though obviously everything would be different without the feds).

7. Jeremy Says:
   June 5th, 2009 at 7:18 pm

   Should the federal government dissolve tomorrow, the regulations would continue being made and enforced (though obviously everything would be different without the feds).

   Well, the parenthetical says it all. The point isn’t to change the basic nature of the struggle. It is to maneuver for a better position, because we stand a better chance of winning when many conditions in the game are different. Secessionism and decentralism are no more “left libertarian” than pamphlets, blogs, markets, and protests are. That doesn’t mean the latter examples shouldn’t be used by left libertarians in pursuit of left libertarian goals.

8. DarianW Says:
   June 6th, 2009 at 1:38 pm

   There would still be plenty of local tyrants to deal with regardless of what happens to the feds. So we need to act locally against them – building local networks in addition to the broad web-centered networks we already have.

9. quasibill Says:
   June 11th, 2009 at 7:25 am

   Darian,

   The point is that, once the federal government is no longer there, the state and local governments can longer count on uniformity across large geographical areas when they game the system in this manner. All it takes is one locality to “opt out”, and suddenly, the productive will flock to it to avoid the burdensome system. This will cause reactions down the line.

   And I’m not sure that, in the absence of state governments, the local enforcement boards would continue – the money flows don’t work without the ability to spread out enforcement costs over large populations. If the boards were fully funded at the local level, they’d either go bankrupt within weeks, or have to severely curtail their activities to only address serious issues that mobilized the community – because the local population isn’t going to like the massive increase in taxes necessary to fund such enforcement boards entirely locally.

   I don’t disagree that there would still be local tyrants – but they would be more of the type of southern racists or Nazis – tyrants who deny the very humanity of certain easily identified minorities, not the run-of-the-mill, casual oppression that occurs currently. In other words, it would be far easier to point out the evil, and have the population recognize it as evil, than it is currently.

   And I completely agree that building local networks is an important priority at this point. Especially in pursuit of non-political or non-ideological goals – community kitchens, community gardens, heck, even block parties – anything to get people in a community to get to know each other as human beings instead of statistics. It’s easier to have compassion for a human being than it is to have compassion for an abstract statistic.