Anyone who has ever taken a multiple-choice exam has experience with distractors. Every question has one or more answers that look good, appear to be logical and just feel right. But they are wrong. Students that don’t really understand the question will choose them every time. Only those with in-depth knowledge of the subject can resist them and choose the correct answer. The teacher is thus able to minimize the chance that students will guess the correct answer.
Politicians have traditionally been the grand masters of using distractors. They say one thing but do another while we are distracted by their rhetoric. Many people erroneously attribute the Law of Unintended Consequences to laws that really work just as intended but were promoted using good distractors thus leading people to think the distractor was actually signed into law. Even politicians with honorable intentions but slow reading skills get hoodwinked into voting for distractors because they don’t read what they are voting for.
The radical environmentalists are giving the politicians a run for their money though. (Yes, I know it is really our money!) They have a whole litany of distractors that they have inculcated into our brains. They range from little green lies to great green whoppers but they are so well crafted and repeated so often that most folks treat them as proven theories. Meanwhile, the real agendas slide in the back door on the coattails of sympathetic or gullible politicians. Ever heard of the “Salmon Recovery Plan?” It makes Bill Clinton’s firing of a couple cruise missiles at an aspirin factory to get us to forget about Monica—what the heck was her name—pale in comparison. We don’t even think about the billions of dollars subsidizing commercial salmon fishing.
If you want to know what is really going on in our world, get better at spotting and ignoring distractors. They are everywhere.
Monthly Archives: March 2010
Buffer, Buffer, Who gets the Buffer?
As you listen to your favorite practitioner of the Great Green Lie extol the virtues of ever larger buffers on your 5 or 10 or 15 acres, please keep the following photos in mind. The buffer on the stream in unincorporated King County is 300 feet from the edge of the wetland that gets bigger every year.
Salmon bearing stream in Unincorporated King County – May Creek
Best Salmon Bearing Stream in Bellevue – Kelsey Creek
Salmon bearing stream in Renton – Honey Creek
It runs in a pipe under the Albertson’s parking lot!
For the supposed good of all, rural folks are forced to minimize their density, uses, and value while the urban folks are forced to maximize their density, uses, and value to the displeasure of both. The constitution says that property taken for the use of all has to be paid for. Even the US Supreme Court agreed in Kelo that property taken and given to private interests has to be paid for. Environmental restrictions applied to those who have taken the best care of their environment while those who have turned their environment into concrete get a bye is simple theft—not “Smart Growth.”
If we all had to pay for Gang Green’s foolishness, taxpayers might demand a constructive prioritization of projects instead of just making a rural minority pay the costs so that they can feel all warm and fuzzy while destroying where they live.
Amnesty
King County’s Department of Development and Environmental Services (DDES) has had a long-standing marketing program known unofficially as “1-800 Turn in Your Neighbor.” It has been a very effective way to bring in the funds necessary to make payroll each month, since DDES must finance its operations through fees and fines rather than tax dollars. They also periodically run a marketing program designed to get folks to turn in themselves. It is called “Amnesty.”
A quick look at the law.com dictionary shows the following definition:
Amnesty – n. a blanket abolition of an offense by the government, with the legal result that those charged or convicted have the charge or conviction wiped out.
The DDES amnesty falls rather short of the definition. If you turn yourself in, the fees you pay will be half what you will pay if your neighbor turns you in. It’s a bureaucracy’s idea of a half-price sale. I think it would be entirely appropriate for DDES to have a real amnesty for property owners. Currently, property owners are held liable for any improvements done to their property without the appropriate fees paid to DDES even if those improvements were by previous owners. Over the years, DDES and its predecessor BALD, have done a pathetic job of catching those doing unpermitted work. Concurrently, those department’s ineptitude has caused long lead times and high costs to get official permission which has led many to not bother asking for that permission. Meanwhile, DDES has no fiduciary responsibility to property owners whose work they do inspect when they fail to identify life-threatening conditions. They collect fees as though they are professionals but are not held to any professional standard whatever.
I can personally attest to the futility of asking DDES a pre-purchase question such as, “Has the accessory dwelling on the property I am about to purchase been permitted?” The answer was “Yes” before the purchase but “No” four years later. It is outrageous that buyers, who have no way to determine undisclosed problems with DDES, should be held responsible for the sins of previous owners. DDES should be held accountable for not doing their job when the infraction occurred. Some future owner who has done nothing wrong should not pay for their incompetence. Those future owners should be held harmless by King County.
It is time to wipe the slate and start over. Put a real amnesty in place now and forgive all past transgressions. Activity on any property that is causing provable harm to some neighbor can be stopped via the common law courts. Put a system in place at DDES so that future buyers have a guarantee backed by the County that they are not liable if the current owner has not followed the rules after the amnesty date. Allow buyers to sue King County when they discover that work inspected by DDES is not to code and is unsafe. Ratchet down the regulations to a point where permits can be obtained quickly and for low cost. Move most DDES employees to inspections instead of lengthy plan review. Plan review should be the job of engineers and architects who have a fiduciary responsibility to, and can be sued by, property owners for failures of their professional obligations.
Individual Control or Collectivist Control?
Many land use issues boil down to the question of who should make the decision as to the most appropriate use for any given property.
Private property rights advocates will usually choose the owner of the property. They believe that the person who owns the property will recognize that their best interest lies in the wise use and conservation of the resources of the property. Property rights advocates recognize that there is a small fraction of property owners who will take a shortsighted approach, pillage the resources and then move on. Humans tend to project their actions onto others. They assume that others will see things similarly to themselves and consequently behave much as they themselves would. Because most property rights advocates manage their properties well, they assume that most other folks will also manage their property wisely. They will agree that society needs to deal with the small percentage whose unwise use of their property adversely impacts their neighbors, but only when the impacts exceed some fairly high bar.
The flip side of private property ownership is collective ownership of property. By projecting their own actions, collectivists assume that individual owners will more often than not take the shortsighted approach of pillaging the property and often cause harm to their neighbors. The solution to that problem is management by committee via a large body of rules and regulations that are applied to all property, or at least the property that isn’t owned by the collective, or the abolition of private property by moving ownership to the collective.
Through some mechanism unknown to me, it is assumed that the collective mind will devise a better use of the property than any individual might. My personal experience is that, while two heads may be better than one, the law of diminishing returns comes into play quickly as the size of the group increases. It doesn’t take a very large collective to prove the truth of the old saying, “Collectively, they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the directions were on the heel!” Collectively we are able to make much larger mistakes than an individual would. There have been several large collectivist failures in the last century or so that we might want to learn from.
I do find the collectivist attributes projected onto the property rights advocates interesting to contemplate. We thus become “ideologues” and “developers” and “sprawl mongers” and “clear cutters” among other interesting titles used to portray us as bad people because we aren’t collectivists. We certainly have ideas and use our right of speech to convey those ideas to others. I, for one, am certainly grateful for the houses I have lived in over the years that were built by developers. Most property rights advocates will choose a house with some property around it rather than an apartment in a downtown high-rise and not feel that we are destroying the earth by that decision.
I’m unsure what to think of the “clear-cutter” label. During the King County CAO debates Mr. Constantine and Mr. Sims and Mr. Trohimovich kept telling me that according to the new CAO it would be perfectly okay to clearcut my 65% native vegetation set-aside area as long as I acquired a “forest production plan.” Mr. Trohimovich said on radio that clear cutting is what we do out here in the rural areas. So is the label of “clear-cutter” good or bad? What if I don’t want to clear-cut my set-aside, maybe just replace it with an orchard? Prevention of clear-cutting seems to be the primary rationale for preventing most uses of 65% of rural King County. And yet, the spokesmen kept saying it is okay. In hindsight, it was these very spokesmen for the collective that were proposing to violate state law—a larger transgression than the one they were pretending to fix.
We have a prime example of collectivists destroying what an individual had protected for many years on Maury Island. Mr. Kerry Lapine owned, for twelve years, a couple of acres that happened to support a blue heron rookery. The birds had used the property for their rookery before Mr. Lapine purchased it. In fact, it was the largest rookery in Puget Sound with 200 to 300 nests, depending on the year. Mr. Lapine carefully kept people away during nesting and rearing times. He did a good job protecting the
herons. The collectivists who run the Vashon Maury Island Land Trust decided that Mr. Lapine should no longer be the caretaker of the rookery and brought much pressure to bear on Mr. Lapine with the help of their friends at DDES. Eventually, a trade was negotiated, and VMILT took over ownership of the rookery. They allowed folks to go near the nests at the wrong time of the year and within two years all the heron were gone. What had been an important environmental feature wisely managed by Mr. Lapine, was destroyed by collectivists who couldn’t find the proverbial “directions on the heel.”
These are the same folks who propose to manage all private property in King County, Washington, and these United States because they think property owners are too dumb to do it themselves.
