Freedom vs. Liberty

“The high-level state Government has no fucking right to drive down my fucking property values, especially with local authorities opposed.”

-Site Commenter Miles SG

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments section at Matthew Yglesias’ site. It concern the establishment of a Tea Party organized group called “The Campaign for Liberty” that was founded in opposition to a state law restricting localities ability to place land use restrictions on private property. What the law says, essentially, is that localities must designate areas where medium-density and mixed use contruction is permitted. Basically what we’re talking about here are apartment buildings and light commecial real-estate, such as a 7-11 or a dentist’s office. But this law has some local residents up in arms, worried that letting another man do what he wants with his own property will negatively affect someone else’s property values. Yglesias notes the odd contradictions in play:

This is a country where the free market position is that for-profit colleges should have a right to unrestricted government subsidies. So why shouldn’t “liberty” mean the liberty of rich suburbanites to ban medium-density construction? Here’s a group of people being forced to do something they don’t like and they don’t like being forced to accept urbanization any more than conservatives like being forced to let gay couples get married or the conservatives of yore liked being forced to integrate the Montgomery bus system. Change feels coercive to people.

Indeed, it’s probably not news to anyone who has paid close attention to the “freedom” and “liberty” rhetoric of conservatives, that their words and their policy positions are often in deep contradiction. As much as some conservatives harp about the “sacrosanct nature of private property rights” what they often seem to actually mean is that their private property rights are sacrosanct. As soon as a developer decides to put land that it owns to use in a manner that would negatively impact area property values, the sacrosanct nature of property rights all too often goes out the window.

This is not to say that I, personally, oppose land use restrictions. Surely one should be able to buy a home safe in the knowledge that the house next door won’t be torn down and replaced with a nightclub a few years down the road. But what is grating is the lack of consistency and intellectual sophistication on the part of conservatives who trot out the phrases “liberty” and “freedom” to justify positions that serve only to advance a narrow personal interest, and clearly have little bearing on a more broad, abstract conception of freedom or liberty.

In other words: “It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.”