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Zoning laws are the worse of two (or more) evils

February 25, 2009 – 9:33 pm by John

I liked Charles Johnson’s letter to the editor of the Las Vegas Sun, criticizing the Clark County government for forcing a local church to stop building, or reduce in size, three large crosses it was planning to erect on its property.

The bellowing blowhard busybody brigade complains these crosses — built on land the church owns, with money freely given to the church for that purpose — would encroach upon the views from their yards. Sad as that may be, the view from your yard stops being your own private property once you start looking over another’s land.
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Of course, we are informed government zoning laws require shorter crosses. No doubt; that’s exactly why government zoning is a ridiculous and petty tyranny. Such laws should be immediately and completely abolished.

Leave South Hills Church alone. What goes up on their own property is their own business.

How terrible it would be for a church to have three crosses that are larger than some petty criminals decided should be the limit for “accessory structures.” Almost as bad as citizens, legislators, and bureaucrats threatening to fine, imprison, and, if resisted, murder the church property owners for daring to do what they want with their own property (and only their own property).

I’ve never even been to Nevada, but I bet Charles didn’t really think such principled advocation of property rights would be looked upon favorably by a city newspaper. (Update: Well, Vin Suprynowicz writes for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and they’ve tolerated him for years, but this was a different paper.)

I understand the objection that many Statists have to a hypothetical world without zoning laws. People would have to suffer hog-fat rendering plants on one side of their homes and airports on another! I doubt that would happen, for a variety of reasons. For instance, homesteading rights for homeowners and homeowners’ associations who were there first and protection against pollution from industrial properties, in a libertarian, common-law tradition, would serve us just fine. And, admit it: the free market is capable of innovating and implementing myriad solutions that you and I and (especially) State bureaucrats never would have thought of. It isn’t a good idea for Statists to deny this truth anymore; steadfast opposition to any and all individual freedoms is more consistent.

Statists imagine that homes and businesses would be ugly, they would pollute, they would be loud, they would generally be impossible to deal with and would lower everyone’s property values, without the stern fist of the State to impose order upon them. Yes, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it. What a nightmare. Almost as hellish as living under a monopolistic state that wastes trillions of dollars and destroys wealth with unmatched tenacity; that extracts property taxes, income taxes, estate taxes, sales taxes, capital gains taxes, and every other tax it can get away with and shoots you dead if you protest enough; that monopolizes the currency, the utilities, the justice [sic] system, the education system; that, in an increasingly transparent and brazen (or clueless) fashion enriches itself at the expense of its subjects; that operates by threatening, fining, beating, kidnapping, enslaving, and murdering people who do things with their own property that it disapproves of—those are far, far worse, by many orders of magnitude, than living across the street from a church that builds three large crosses on its own property.

Posted in Divisiveness, Property rights, Unrealistic