A Georgia Town Takes the People’s Business Private - NYTimes.com
"The prospect of more Sandy Springs-style incorporations concerns people like Evan McKenzie, author of “Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government.” He worries that rich enclaves may decide to become gated communities writ large, walling themselves off from areas that are economically distressed."
2 comments:
The prospect of more Sandy Springs-style incorporations
concerns people like Evan McKenzie, author of “Privatopia:
Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private
Government.” He worries that rich enclaves may decide to
become gated communities writ large, walling themselves off
from areas that are economically distressed.
“You could get into a ‘two Americas’ scenario here,” he says.
“If we allow the more affluent to institutionally isolate
themselves, then the poor are supposed to do — what?
They’re supposed to have all the poverty and all the social
problems and deal with them?”
That question was answered by a Hollywood-screenwriter-turned-New-York-author who despised "flyover country". People with money don't owe the world anything. The world owes them.
In the December 28, 1957 issue of National Review, Whittaker Chambers wrote in his review of Atlas Shrugged (singe page view here) that:
The strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy.
. . .
So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character traces in the air, “over the desolate earth,” the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the “mysticism of mind” and the “mysticism of muscle”).
That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which “has resolved personal worth into exchange value,” “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash-payment.’” The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: “And I mean it.” But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired “naked self-interest” (in its time and place), and for much the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment.
. . .
From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!”
wonder how long it will be before the vendors start colluding to rip off both the cities AND the residents. All one needs to do is to look at virtually any HOA subdivision to see what is going to happen.
1. Things will "look" okay at first
2. When large dollars disappear - it will be a "civil" matter, i.e., a contractual dispute rather than a criminal offense. Who would the city call, anyway - the managing agent? Ha ha ha. Who do they think will be ripping the city off?
3. When residents get pulled over for running those red lights which sound as if they have been programmed to elicit a "run the light" response, who pulls them over, a cop in a box? When the cop demands payments directly to the cop (just like HOA management companies and HOA attorneys) rather than payment to the city, is that a crime or a breach of contract?
4. I suspect that it won't be long until Sandy Springs devolves into a place that few would want to live.
Post a Comment