Posted on 05/14/2008 7:31:50 PM PDT by jazusamo
In one of those typical San Francisco decisions that makes San Francisco a poster child for the liberal left, the city's Board of Supervisors is moving to block a paint store from renting a vacant building once used by a video rental shop.
That paint store is part of a chain, and chain stores are not liked by a vocal segment of the local population. Chain stores are already banned from some parts of San Francisco, and at least one member of the Board of Supervisors plans to introduce bans on chain stores in other areas.
Chain stores have been disliked for decades, at both local and national levels. Taking advantage of economies of scale that lower their costs of doing business, chain stores are able to charge lower prices than smaller independent stores, and therefore attract customers away from their higher-cost competitors.
The economics of this is certainly not too "complex" to understand. However, politics is not economics, so politicians tend to respond to people's emotional reactions-- and if economic realities stand in the way, then so much the worse for economics.
All sorts of laws and court decisions, going back as far as the 1930s, have tried to prevent the economies of scale that lower costs from being reflected in lower prices that drive high-cost competitors out of business.
Economists may say that benefits always have costs, that there is no free lunch-- but how many votes do economists have?
There was a time when courts would have stopped politicians from interfering with people's property rights by banning chain stores. After all, if whoever owns the vacant video rental store in San Francisco wants to rent it to the paint company, and the paint company is willing to pay the rent, why should politicians be involved in the first place?
However, once the notion of "a living Constitution" became fashionable, the Constitution's protection of property rights has been "interpreted" virtually out of existence by judges.
The biggest losers are not people who own property but people who have to pay higher prices because politicians make it harder for businesses that charge lower prices to come into the community.
Despite the political myth that government is protecting us from big businesses charging monopoly prices, the cold fact is that far more government actions have been taken against businesses that charge low prices than against businesses that charge high prices.
The biggest antitrust cases of a century ago were against the Great Northern Railroad and the Standard Oil Company, both of which charged lower prices than their competitors.
The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 was called "the anti-Sears, Roebuck law" because it was directed again this and other chains that charged lower prices than smaller retailers could match.
For a long time, there were so-called Fair Trade Laws designed to keep low-cost businesses in general from charging low prices that drive high-cost businesses out of business.
Fortunately, enough sanity eventually prevailed that Fair Trade Laws were repealed. But the emotional needs that such laws met were still there, and today they find an outlet in hostility to Wal-Mart and other "big box" stores-- especially in San Francisco and other bastions of the liberal left.
People have every right to indulge their emotions at their own expense. Unfortunately, through politics, those emotions are expressed in laws and administrative decisions by people who pay no price at all for indulging either their own emotions or the emotions of the people who vote for them.
That is why the Constitution tried to erect barriers to government power, of which property rights were one. But, once judges started saying that "the public interest" over-rides property rights, that left politicians free to call whatever they wanted to do "the public interest."
Neither economics nor property rights are too "complex" to understand. But both get in the way of willful people who seek to deny other people the right to make their own decisions.
Anyone who doesn't like chain stores is free not to shop there. But that is wholly different from saying that they have a right to stop other people from exercising their own freedom of choice. That's not too "complex" to understand.
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Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
It sounds to me that you would like to ban just the stores that Sowell is writing about here but for different reasons. The reasons make no difference if the result is the same. Just like Sowell says, it’s your option, don’t patronize those stores or move if you don’t like the results of them moving into your hood.
This is simply another example of Dr. Sowell's point about people's using the power of government to enforce their own prejudices. In this case, it's the "prejudice" that it's a very nice thing for Mayor X and Councilmember Y to get a nice big donation from Corporation Z.
The reason NIMBY exists is because people believe that having lived in a place for a while, contributing to it, and enjoying it, that it is worth protecting from those who seek to quickly profit from its exploitation, when that exploitation does not improve it, and in fact takes away from its desirability. “If you don’t like it, then move out” is unreasonable.
Because this desire to exploit is so great, neighborhoods across the US have been forced to put limits on growth, development, and zoning. There are always those who would take advantage of a place to abuse it, otherwise.
As a rule of thumb, few would find anything wrong with putting limits on the construction of waste dumps, a crematorium, an abattoir, etc. next to a residential area, especially if they are intended to displace things like churches, schools, or residences.
Just owning property does not give a corporation an unlimited right to use that property as they see fit.
This also applies to limits to type of business as well. There is no compelling right that every business on a block be franchises that only employ minimum wage workers. Zoning should also encompass things like business diversity in an area, such as limiting the number of bars, reasonable business hours, advertising and building design, etc.
Because franchises tend to cluster, know no moderation, and also tend to be litigious, it is just easier to prohibit them from an area entirely. Experiencing this to some degree already, corporations have taken to both trying to subvert city councils and to use SLAPP tactics against local opposition.
So on one side there is NIMBY, and on the other, some degree of ruthlessness. There is no gentle approach, anymore.
Your comment makes me wonder if Dr. Sowell even calls himself an African-American?Would to God that an African-American such as Dr Sowell would run for President
Professor Sowell doesn't like being labeled like that. He especially does not want a book of his on, say, economics categorized under, "books by black authors" - which is, as he notes, a ghetto in the bookstore. He writes an economics book, he wants people who look under "economics" in the bookstore to find it there.On the point of the desirability of having a president who is as wise as I perceive Professor Sowell to be, there can be no question about that. I'm right on board, as my tagline indicates. Except that, knowing as I do that someone else will be nominated for president by the Republicans and that Thomas Sowell himself considers himself too old and his health inadequate to such a position, my tagline is actually a call for a Republican VP nominee who is comparable to Sowell in wisdom, in patriotism, and in racial/cultural heritage.
I argue that the provision in the Twelfth Amendment incentivizing the nomination of a VP candidate from a different state than the presidential candidate is actually an, AFAIK the only, affirmative action provision in the Constitution. And that the intent of that provision is that the VP nominee be chosen to promote national unity - literally across state lines, but in principle across whatever divide the presidential candidate and his party may consider dangerous to national unity.
I remember Bob Dole, in his 1996 acceptance speech, verbally protesting as emphatically as possible that the Republican Party was not racist. Did he get any more credit on that score than any other Republican presidential candidate? No. In fact, the memorable part of the VP debate that year was Al Gore smearing the Republican Party as a whole by complimenting Jack Kemp that he was not racist like the rest of the Republican Party (and Jack Kemp, by accepting that "compliment," destroyed his standing in the Republican Party). IMHO there is nothing short of the nomination of a black VP which will do any good on that score.
Will the nomination of a black VP enable McCain to get more black votes than Barak Obama? Not on you life. It won't even win him as much as 10% of black vote against Obama. Then why do it? Because such a candidate would contrast with Barak "Jeremy Wright" Obama, and the differences would show the deficiencies of Obama in bold relief. It might help with some blacks - but it will make a positive difference for every group you can name except racists, whether white or black. And though I am prepared to believe that there are white racists out there who are so extreme that they would reject a ticket with a patriotic black at the bottom of it even when the other major ticket has a black racist at the head of the ticket, at this late date I am not prepared to believe that there are enough kooks like that to matter in a national election.
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