40R Overdue and Underdone
The 40R overlay is overdue and underdone. Even Biden, the New York Times and other Leftists say that anti-development, government regulations caused the housing shortage and higher prices.
Ryan Fabian (12/5/24 FNN) seems to agree and disagree as he describes his “helpless” response to the mindset of an allegedly “unsustainable constant-growth” economy. This is the unfocused mind denying the reality of our increasingly productive, scientific-industrial-capitalist civilization. And waiting for the Apocalypse as punishment for intellectual pride and stealing the fire of the gods. Man’s focused mind, protected by the right to property, production, trade and the pursuit of profit, is not part of his regressive politics.
And how am I to face the odds
of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
in a world I never made.
[A.E. Housman]
North Hollywood “multistory hellboxes,” created by satanic “developers,” which attracted “blank-faced tech workers and unbridled homelessness” are his experience of California’s economy. Focused minds have been regarded with suspicion since envious, primitive tribespeople gave the evil eye to their more productive members. California’s Leftist war against development raised housing prices. Their welfare state attracted many unproductive people. Those are the causes of that state’s homelessness.
“Dinky boutique storefronts with high rents in a manufactured[!] part of town” also frighten him. Apparently, he expects towns to pop up out of Mother Earth like mushrooms after a spring rain. And both “affordable housing and luxury apartments” are oppressive. Contradictions are part of the unfocused mind.
Man’s productive mind is not part of this return to 300,000 years of pre-capitalist “sustainability, preservation, conservation, and maintenance.”
“Sustainability” is Leftist code for the sacrifice of man, allegedly to wild nature, but, rejecting any ideals, really to nothing. Sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice.
This is merely the unfocused mind of the 1960s, New Left response to the blood-drenched failure of industrial, city-based Marxism. Cambodia’s Pol Pot, educated in Rousseau’s attack on man’s mind and its creation, civilization, forced people out of cities, murdering a third of his countrymen, some for wearing glasses. They probably read books, a possible sign of independent thought.
“The fatigue of thinking becomes everyday more painful to me,” wrote Rousseau. “To be as irresponsible as I please, finally to give myself up unconstrainedly to my fantasies.”
Sandal shops and dream-catchers are the Leftist dream. They think small. They hate bigness. As classically educated, ‘60s rocker, Marianne Faithfull, so tartly warbled, “We’ve been trying to get high without having to pay.”
Fairhaven’s government should get out of its economy and limit itself to the protection of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The mystical ideal of the common good is merely a rationalization of the sacrifice of the individual. The right to build should not be violated. Individuals who don’t like crowded towns are free to move to forests, mountains and deserts. Ninety-five percent of America’s territory remains undeveloped. I don’t know, however, if pizza delivery is available. Maybe by drones. Or bears and wolves.
Stephen Grossman, Fairhaven
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