I posed this question to the good perfessor who owns this blog over the weekend. He thinks not and I tend to agree.
But the political climate is such that private HOA government is finding itself under fire just as are all levels of public government. So now when HOAs so much as appear to be trampling on someone's rights of expression and redress of grievances, they too get their turn in the media spotlight.
The stories get additional legs in the blogosphere such as this post at a Yahoo News blog by Liz Goodwin. Goodwin reports the American Civil Liberties Union is defending an Arizona man ordered by his HOA to furl his "Don't Tread On Me" Gadsen flag.
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If you want to know what libertarians think about this, read the comments at reason.com/blog/2010/09/01/let-his-freak-flag-fly
As I have stated before, I am not hopeful about the Tea Party demographic -- conservatives, libertarians, and Ayn Randians -- ever supporting individual home owners against the abuses of HOAs.
And I don't expect conservative and libertarian pundits and bloggers -- modern day privatopian Walter Durantys -- to expose HOA corporations for what they really are.
Consider that conservatives, and some large fraction of libertarians, favor laws that would prohibit mandatory membership in a labor union as a condition of employment, yet have no problem with mandatory membership in an HOA union as a condition of home ownership. The thought of government regulation voluntary contracts regarding the freedom of association horrifies them (except when it comes to labor unions).
They favor paycheck protection laws, which would prohibit labor union dues from being used for political purposes. But they have never objected to HOA union dues being used for lobbying by the Communisty Associations Institute.
Conservatives and libertarians favor tort reform. Fox Business recently aired a program about parasitic tort lawyers by John Stossel. Yet they have been silent about the extortion of home owners by attorneys working for HOA rackets, which should provide no shortage of fodder for litigation related horror stories. Why?
The "support the troops" punditocracy didn't have anything to say about the theft of Captain Michael Clauer's home, leaving it instead to the left-wing Mother Jones and liberal NPR "All Things Considered" to inform the American public. Conservative and libertarian outlets like Fox News and Pajamas Media should have been all over this story, which broke just before Memorial Day weekend. But I guess their interests in corporate communism trumped the individual private property rights of a soldier deployed to Iraq.
Like the useful idiots whose romantic notions of Communism blinded them to the real nature of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc., the apologists and enablers of HOA tyranny are too wedded to their beautiful theories or privatized corporate government to acknowledge the real world results of
"repressive libertarianism," where certain people who call themselves libertarians
invariably side with property owners who want to limit other people's liberties through
the use of contract law. Property rights (usually held by somebody with a whole lot of
economic clout) trump every other liberty.
or even conceive of The Privatized Toll Road To Serfdom.
If fewer and fewer Americans become property owners -- which is a very possible future given the current housing situation -- then only a small minority will enjoy the rights that libertarians want to reserve for property owners. For the rest of us, Libertarian Utopia will resemble some modern day form of feudalism.
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