I was honored to learn this morning that The Village Voice had included me in their listing of the "10 Worst Rightblogger Ideas of 2016."
Here’s a link to the piece, and here’s the money quote:
“Local control is not a trump card that allows municipalities to restrict economic freedom,” declaimed Tom Giovanetti at the Institute for Policy Innovation. Get outta here with this “consent of the governed” bullshit — we’re talking about money!
The macro context here is what Village Voice views as those nutjob libertarians and their insistence on economic freedom, and the micro context is the debate over cities like Austin, Texas regulating Uber out of the city. Village Voice sees this as democracy in action, of course, while I see it as the tyranny of the majority infringing on the economic freedom of the average guy.
Now, I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek here, of course, but since you know a man by his enemies, I’m delighted that the lefties at the Village Voice find my arguments to be ridiculous.
I plan to do a lot more in 2017 on this whole topic of local control, by the way. If you want to read some of what I’ve written on this, here is a link, and here is another. I even said that “Local control is not sacred” way back in 2006 in testimony to the Florida Legislature. In summary, local control is not a governing principle, and if you think it is, you don’t know your civics. States determine the scope of municipal power, and states are entirely within their rights to limit municipal power, whether it’s in regard to fracking bans, or bathroom rules, or tree ordinances, or municipal broadband networks, or pretty much anything else. Municipalities administer the laws, but are not some kind of medieval fortress city-states. They are not sovereign, in other words. Tyranny is not okay just because it shows up in the form of an ordinance supported by the majority of a city council or referendum vote.
Look for more on this in 2017.