zoning for death

A NY Times editorial published today insinuates that the heady sin of avarice is alive and thriving in the real estate industry, to the detriment of public safety. The article speaks of various regulations that Department of Buildings has tried to implement in the wake of the tragedy at ground zero, among them the widening of and the increase of required staircases.

The main force against such safety precautions is said to be the real estate industry, who are stalwart against the maximization of 'dead weight', space which is neither rentable nor salable, and hence unable to be capitalized.

As usual, what we have here is a few bureaucrats attempting to supplant the will of the people, to try to overrule their desired level of safety, to force them to pay for more safety then what they are willing to voluntarily part for by themselves.

[Monetary] greed, the most maligned, misunderstood characteristic is bandied here as though it simply were a destructive life force of its own. Say what you will of morality in general, but scratch an avowed amoralist, and you should find his instinctual hatred for avarice right there for all to see. I certainly can recognize the presence of greed, but I try to avoid ascribing to it the power of causal explanation.

In this case, it would be far more fruitful to state that the prior intervention of zoning regulation has come at the expense of public safety. Zoning, by arbitrarily and artificially constraining the natural growth of the human habitat has upset the delicate balance of market preferences into favoring space-maximizing strategies at the cost of public safety. It is a safe bet to say that in the absence of such well-intentioned intervention, society will have a better chance at working to obtain an optimal admixture of safety, and pleasant cages than it would otherwise.

Instead of pettily focusing on the motive of greed, it would be more mature (and productive!) to recognize it as an immutable nature of what it means to be human, and to let institutions and relations develop anarchically around that natural formation how they will.

King Pharaoh, Anarcho-capitalist

Admit one John C. Wright to the hallowed ranks of anarcho-capitalists, as this following paragraph serves as his endorsement. Witness;

"I should mention: it was not until I became a Christian that I realized how scary Christians seem to their foes. Here am I, newly vowed to a faith that says I may not lift a hand to defend myself, may not hate my deadly enemies even in my secret heart, but must to pray for them and love them even when they come to kill me; and yet perfect strangers write in to my livejournal to tell me that they quail in a perfect cold sweat of terror, stockpiling arms, because we Xtians are about to oversweep the world and install a Theocracy so tyrannical it will make the Pharaoh seem like an anarcho-capitalist. It happened more than once: people writing me to tell me they were afraid of me. Now, I assume they are not actually afraid of me, because otherwise I would merely pass their names and IP address along to the Holy Office, so that the Jesuit albino-assassins or Benedictine-built killer-robots could come beat them to death with radio-active crucifixes. I hope I am wrong, but I secretly suspect it is puffery, a pose of moral superiority. I have to be painted the aggressor, so that they can paint themselves the victim."

There is a chock-load of interesting material in that post, the author detailing his beliefs and prejudices at the time he began the series, along with the various creative techniques he employed to pen the Chronicles of Chaos trilogy. Although it's quite prolix, I heartily recommend it to those who are familiar with the novels, and were perhaps looking for more critical understanding (verstehen) of the characters' paradigms.