This rant pertains to the portion of Asheville City Council’s budget discussions pertaining to government meddling in personal affairs. It consists of stray thoughts from reading the proposed Strategic Operating Plan. Socialism used to be such an ugly word. Then, government ran up such great debts, it had to reach out to the private sector to pay the excesses taxpayers might remember in the voting booth. “Partnerships” became the rage.

Women got liberated and realized they could raise delinquents better without having to put up with a man in the house. It was the working taxpayers’ responsibility to buy them a house and feed their children breakfast and lunch in school. Government could cover daycare too, and indoctrinate kids on how to re-elect advocates of government programs, expanded programs for failed programs, and programs to exacerbate the wreckage of programs. If I sound angry, it’s because I’m awaiting the prognosis of the damage caused by a little angel who embraces the new philosophy that there are no property rights and she is the master to play with and damage anything she surveys. What does one expect? Mom has a house full of little ones. They live amidst gunfire and emergency vehicles in public housing. Mom has to work to try to enough money to move to a safe place. When mom’s gone, the little kids can be raised by the other find role models without parental guidance in the hood. When mom’s home, she’s too exhausted to keep up with her streetwise young’ns. The little angel’s big brother recently got beat up on the way back from a community event. In Asheville, there are no property rights. Just ask state or local representatives. Everything belongs to the community. The world is the canvas of graffitists – until a generous campaign contributor gets hit. Local anarchists recently went on a damage-spree, cracking car windows, etc. for no apparent reason. The perps are expected to get off because police evidence has been compromised. Government exists to blow smoke and promise good feelings for lots of money. To paraphrase a song from Wilhemina W. Witchiepoo on H. R. Pufnstuff, “Property rights, schmoperty rights. Who said?”

So, here’s the game plan. City council members, decision by decision, overextend the city’s resources with desires to be loved, or at least not lambasted and threatened, by the populace. Taxpayers are on the verge of revolting because they have not enjoyed discretionary funds for years. When municipal bills come due, an increase in property taxes would be political suicide. The city therefore has to make new friends through partnerships. The city cannot be content to restrain its exertion of power to the realms of traditional definitions of public safety and natural-monopoly infrastructural needs. It needs to get in the housing business. The city cuts into the business of failing financial institutions to avail low-interest loans to organizations like Mountain Housing Opportunities for building affordable housing. After all, the private sector has not been able to afford to build for a couple years. The city can also buy land and sell it on the cheap to people who will build subsidized housing.

A recent report from the John Locke Foundation observed, “Between December 2007 and December 2010, private-sector employment shrank 9.1 percent, while state and local government payrolls grew 4.2 percent.” A large number of Americans, happy just to earn the next dollar, cannot worry about whether it is taxpayers dollars or proceeds from production that pay their paycheck. Those who do find it impossible to find a job in this “mixed economy” that is not supported in part by government funds. The analogy has been made repeatedly about initiation rites of gangs, cults, and other evil entities. They dirty-up the recruit so he shares the perks and guilt of membership and is therefore less inclined to quit or squeal. Yes, to an outside observer, it would appear big government is bent on taking over the world, offering its tantalizing bait to each and every productive member of society. Its siren song is, “Come. Shuffle papers on the taxpayers’ dime. Your salary is safe. Pay no attention to the absence of material substance in the economy.”

While depriving the private sector of opportunities to run businesses at a profit, the city has maintained as one of its “strategic” goals: Fiscal Responsibility. Objectives under this goal include “levering partnerships” including getting more money from the federal deficit for things like repairing the Civic Center and participating in regional planning. Another fiscally-responsible goal is to explore options of floating bonds and garnering revenue without having to raise property taxes. In other words, the city wants to find ways to make people pay more later, when staff has had time to come up with a compelling line and the taxpayers have been distracted from keeping their eye on the ball.

Green is a great industry. That is why government wants a monopoly on it. The city wants to expand education programs on topics like climate awareness and sustainability. Stimulus funding will support this program through the end of the year. Asheville had a great idea in attempting to green itself, but it was only a gateway for government to extend its greening arm into what’s left of the private sector. Council’s goals speak of, “Conducting a neighborhood scale energy assessment and community energy policy tool assessment with local partners.” Babelfish doesn’t have a button to translate Synergese into English, but one suggested translation is, “Government wants to track personal energy use and come up with laws to modify behavior to conform with council’s visions.” I was recently talking with one of my buddies who likes to conduct high-voltage experiments in his garage.

The last item in this rant will go back to a comment made in an earlier post. The complaint about hiring a minority employee was not intended as racist tripe. Rather, it was lodged against the fallacious notion that the city should attempt to fix a system that wasn’t broken because extra stimulus funding was available and/or it had a chance to hire a “minority.”

In conclusion, the city council SOP objective of Job Growth & Community Development would be best eliminated. Economies thrive when goods and services are exchanged for values agreeable to buyer and seller. Introducing control agencies with regulators and paperwork introduce inefficiencies because they divert labor and capital from production. This has been said a few thousand times, but it is not sinking in with the majority of folks who vote. If I want to buy cheese, I would like to pay the farmer my share for sustaining his cow, processing the milk, and getting his goods to market. I do not want to pay taxes to pay a bureaucrat to write and enforce ordinances to make sure the farmer is not silting the river or feeding his cow grass not approved by the USDA. I do not want the farmer to have to construct BMP’s to make his farmland compliant with this year’s stormwater ordinance, only to rip them out and make them compliant with next year’s inspector’s interpretation of the new stormwater ordinance. I do not want to pay federal bureaucrats to build a marble office to draft USDA regulations and consult with cattle nutritionists on what types of grain should be grown and what trucking companies are best to ship the grain from California to North Carolina and North Carolina in order to make sure the trucking industry uses up its stimulus money. I fund these bureaucrats in my own taxes and in the cost recovery passed down to me by the farmer. Oh, did I mention that the farmer’s cheese tasted fine when his cows were grazing on his own fields, etc., etc., etc.?