The next time an article gets posted about overpopulation and the swarm of reflex posters reappears pooh-poohing the problems of overpopulation, consider this kerfuffle which is really quite trivial.
Our conception of property rights was created at a time when America was a vast wilderness and we only sparsely populated a thin strip along the Atlantic coast. To the west was a vast fastness of wilderness where one could go, clear the land, live out of sight and out of mind of our neighbors and dispose of our property as we individually and alone saw fit. Today we are a country of 315 million people, the population has more than doubled in my lifetime, much of that population increase consists of people who do not share my culture, my language, my very Teutonic conception of orderliness, my sense of civic responsibility.
So people who are as tight-assed as I am seek to have their environment ordered according to their lights. I don't want my neighbor's front yard to have a disused toilet bowl as a planter, I do not want to see his car up on blocks, I do not want him posting commercial signs. In short I want him to have a nice, well groomed, Protestant appearance to his half-acre.
I do not live in the wilderness, I grew up in a leafy suburban upper-middle-class town built largely after World War II. I cannot escape my neighbor therefore I must regulate him but because I need to regulate him I must equally submit myself to regulation. There is the rub.
I am afflicted with normal human nature, I want my neighbor to be regulated according to my tastes but I want to be free of the appearance police myself. When my neighbor is regulated it is to keep property values up but when I am regulated it is fascism on the hoof.
Not only are we imprisoning ourselves in gated gulags in order to avoid the onrush of population which doubles every century, we are desperately trying to protect ourselves from foreign and alien cultures who do not conceive of well manicured lawns as a desirable or even normal way of living. We can no longer flee these people by going into the wilderness, we can only regulate them.
These are the problems that come with population and with immigration. When we try to solve them with regulation we inevitably trade away our freedoms.
