Urban Renaissance Institute

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 7, 2000

Today, the U.S. public may vote for George W. Bush over Al Gore — perhaps by four or five million votes — in the contest for the presidency of the United States. On Dec. 18, when the 538 members of the Electoral College assemble in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia to perform their constitutional duty, they may override the public’s will and elect Al Gore president.

If this occurs, some U.S. experts predict a constitutional crisis. Most Americans don’t realize they are not voting in a national election to select their president; they are voting in 50 separate state elections, plus one for the District of Columbia, to select state-chosen electors who will then cast their votes for president. Though America is the greatest of all democracies, the public may discover that in the year 2000 — as at the founding of the republic — America’s leaders distrust the public too much to allow it to choose the president directly.

Should a constitutional crisis ensue, look to Al Gore and the Democratic party, the tainted winners, to lead the charge to abolish the electoral system in time for the 2004 election. Look to George Bush and the Republicans, who most Americans would see as victims of an unjust system, to fight to preserve the Electoral College system. And look to a constitutional crisis fought along an urban-rural divide.

Although it is more than a century since a presidential candidate won the popular vote but lost the presidency, this startling scenario does not belong to some distant past. It came within a whisker of occurring in the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon and, based on voters’ intentions as they stood last week, this very fate could befall Mr. Bush today. As of Friday, while Gallup, Zogby and most other national polls showed George Bush ahead in the popular vote, the Hotline-National Journal Electoral College projection gave Mr. Bush only 248 firm electoral college votes of the 270 he needs to win, compared with 269 firm votes for Mr. Gore. Because Maine, one of only three states Hotline considers too close to call, splits its four Electoral College votes, Mr. Gore — if Hotline is correct — would likely have been over the top had the vote occurred last week.

Yet on Saturday, the day after the press reported this possibility, Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s respected chief campaign strategist, indicated that the only outcome he feared more than Mr. Bush losing the Electoral College vote was losing the Electoral College itself. Under a direct form of democracy, he told CNN, politicians would spend less time in sparsely populated regions and more in the metropolitan areas, where the voters are. The effect on U.S. democracy, and the U.S. economy, could be profound.

Republicans draw great support from the rural areas: Two of their core constituencies, the Christian Coalition and the National Rifle Association, are particularly powerful there. With both parties forced to court the urban and suburban voters, more than the social agenda would shift.

The economic divide between rural and urban economies would sharpen. The highly subsidized U.S. farm economy, for example, runs at a great loss, with urban industries and urban residents making up the difference. Small-town America, unlike the big cities, also runs at a loss, with subsidies from urban areas needed to maintain water and sewage systems, and to provide electricity to rural areas. Pork barrel projects disproportionately crop up in the countryside.

A president answerable to one national electorate of mostly urban dwellers would be likelier to exercise his veto in rejecting rural pork. And he’d be likelier to side with urban voters, and against rural residents, over whether, for example, federal old-growth forests should be razed by logging communities, at a loss to the federal taxpayer, to maintain short-term jobs. America’s demographics would change. Without subsidies to rural areas, people would tend more to migrate to metropolitan areas, further strengthening the urban-rural divide, and further spurring the removal of the subsidies that so seriously distort the workings of a free market.

In the process, democracy in America would strengthen. In the 2000 presidential election, for example, because 30 to 35 U.S. states have been considered comfortably in either the Gore or Bush camps, the two presidential candidates have vigorously contested 15 to 20 states, and largely ignored the others. Mr. Gore has no incentive to campaign in Texas, where additional popular votes will earn him nothing at the Electoral College, and Mr. Bush similarly has no reason to court New Yorkers. The Electoral College system effectively disenfranchises the majority of the U.S. electorate, contributing to the low voter turnout — over half of the electorate may stay home — that elicits so much concern. That disenfranchisement only deepens on election night when, due to time zone differences, the presidential election is often decided before the first West Coast ballot is counted. Having a president elected by all the people, instead of by all the states, would make everyone’s vote count equally, helping to eliminate much cynicism and to engage much of the electorate.

For these and other reasons, the Electoral College — itself a compromise among the U.S. founding fathers — has been controversial throughout the country’s history. Over the past 200 years, more than 700 proposed constitutional amendments to reform or eliminate it have been introduced in Congress, more than for any other subject. The American Bar Association has characterized the Electoral College as "archaic" and "ambiguous," with 69% of lawyers, in a 1987 poll, favouring its abolition. The public has as well: In 1967, 58% of Americans wanted to be rid of it, in 1968, 81% and in 1981, 75%. Imagine the sentiment for abolition in the fall of 2000, if one candidate for president obtains a four million-vote margin and the other candidate moves into the White House.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 30, 2000

After the U.S. presidential election, USA Today published a startling map showing counties that voted for Al Gore in blue and those that went for George W. Bush in red. The map was a sea of red, with Gore voters relegated to a few blue patches along the coasts and the odd spot in the interior.

Bush supporters see vindication in this map, which largely isolates Gore’s support to densely populated urban and suburban areas. Rugged rural individualists imbued with the entrepreneurial spirit — the very combination that made the country great — voted Republican, they say, while the subsidy-seeking collectivists in the cities went for the Democrats.

The conservatives mostly have it backwards. While cities have their share of collectivists, cities house free traders. Wall Street is in Manhattan, the Mercantile Exchange in Chicago, Hollywood in Los Angeles. Unlike these and other urban powerhouses, which export to the world and generate America’s immense wealth, rural America is primarily a stronghold of the subsidized and collectivized that saps America’s strength. Under a free market system that respected basic property rights, most low density rural communities simply could not exist.

The single greatest infringement on people’s use of their property today comes through local zoning ordinances. Nowhere in the United States is this infringement stricter and more onerous than in rural communities near urban and suburban areas, whose governments typically force owners to maintain extraordinarily large minimum lot sizes of one, two, or five acres. Advocates of minimum lot sizes — including several conservative think-tanks that otherwise rail against government restrictions on the use of personal property — defend these minimums as necessary to maintain property values and the lifestyle that rural residents desire. Individual property owners within these rural communities who might wish to profit by subdividing the land, they argue like classic collectivists, should not be permitted to put their personal gain ahead of the good of the community.

Without this heavy-handed zoning, which prevents owners from putting their land to its best economic use, desirable rural communities — typically those near metropolitan markets — would become denser, and no longer rural. But zoning is only one of many props required to maintain low- density areas. Most basic services provided to rural areas require subsidies. Rural electrification is prohibitively expensive compared with providing power to metropolitan areas. So, too, are water and sewage services. So, too, are roads. The accumulation of these costs, if they were to be paid by the users of the services, would make most of small-town USA unaffordable. Without enormous transfers of wealth, via the tax system, from metropolitan to rural areas, many U.S. towns would become ghost towns.

Archer Daniels Midland, the agribusiness multi-national whose fast-growing advertising budgets massively promote U.S. agriculture and itself as the Supermarket to the World, accurately portrays the U.S. farm economy as one of the country’s largest exporters. The ads do not reveal that farm exports, as well as the entire U.S. farm economy, run at a loss, with subsidies from taxpayers exceeding the agricultural sector’s profits. Although ADM is the poster child for the agricultural economy, it has been, according to the Cato Institute, "the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history …. At least 43% of ADM’s annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30." Wayne Andreas, then chairman of the Decatur, Illinois-based corporation, explained it best to Mother Jones magazine: "People who are not in the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country." People who are not in the Midwest also do not understand that, without subsidies, most farmland far from population centres would revert to forests and wilderness.

Agriculture — by far the largest rural resource industry — accounts for much of the red Bush country that the USA Today map displays. Other large rural industries — the logging towns dependent on uneconomic cutting of old growth forest, for example — also bleed red ink. Rural America does have one vibrant, true-blue industry — tourism, which prospers by servicing those Gore supporters from the cities.

The entire U.S. resource economy — the farming, fishing, forestry and mining industries that form rural America’s heartland — account for but 3% of the country’s GDP, less than, for example, motion pictures and other copyright industries, an overwhelmingly urban sector that also includes sound recording, entertainment and business software, and book publishing. This fabulously profitable creative sector has become America’s number one exporter. But it, too, is dwarfed in size by the service sector — representing close to two-thirds of the U.S. economy, thanks to fast growing, urban-dominated knowledge-based industries.

In contrast to the plodding, government-dependent rural economy, urban America is steeped with wheelers and dealers, retailers, traders, dot-com entrepreneurs and others dependent upon a free market economy. Because urbanites have so big a stake in globalization, Gore is an ardent free trader, as is Clinton. They, after all, brought in NAFTA and — had they not been defeated by pro-union Democrats and protectionist Republicans in Congress — would have obtained fast-track authority to greatly expand trade.

Bush supporters — defensive at losing ground in Congress and in state governorships, defensive at losing the country- wide popular vote for president and at losing the Electoral College outside Florida, fearful that they will win Florida’s electoral seats only because elderly and ill-educated Democrats failed to vote properly — seized upon the USA Today map to reveal some hidden truth. They attained, instead, collective delusion.

THE U.S. VOTE, COUNTY BY COUNTY:

Al Gore won in 677 counties and George W. Bush in 2,434 counties, according to preliminary results.

SQUARE KILOMETRES OF COUNTIES WON

Gore: 1,502,556

Bush: 6,285,658

POPULATIONS (1999) OF COUNTIES WON

Gore: 127 million

Bush: 143 million

POPULATIONS (1990-99) OF COUNTIES WON

Gore: 5%

Bush: 14%

Note: County election data not reported for Alaska, unavailable from two counties in other states.

Source: Associated Press, ESRI Inc., USA Today, National Post

Read a counter-argument from the Ayn Rand Institute: A response to: Urban free traders or rural individualists

Robert Tracinski
National Post
November 30, 2000

Please see the original article: Urban free traders or rural individualists

The vote for president wasn’t even close. I know what you’re thinking. If you look at the national totals, the Electoral College count, and the chaos in Florida, this election is probably the closest in history. But look at it again, state by state, precinct by precinct, and you’ll notice a very different story. For about half of the nation — clustered in urban areas, mainly in the Northeast and on the West Coast — Al Gore was the clear winner. But a huge swath of the country — the South, West, Midwest, and rural districts practically everywhere — chose George W. Bush by a landslide.

Folks in my own county in central Virginia, for example, voted for Bush by 54% to 43%; in some precincts, the margin was more than 2 to 1. But if you live in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, or in Cambridge, Mass., you probably don’t know anyone who voted for Bush. And that is the conflict in this election. It is a clash primarily between urban elites and what those elites sometimes call "flyover country." It’s a clear contrast between two Americas with two different views of life.

Rural America generally reflects the original values of America’s founding. In all things, wrote the famous 19th- century observer of American culture, Alexis de Tocqueville, the American "relies on individual effort and judgment." The typical American was contemptuous of tradition and authority and confident in his ability to solve his own problems. This led the Americans to accept a moral philosophy of "self-interest properly understood" — that is, long-term, rational self-interest — a viewpoint "you hear … as much from the poor as from the rich." And for the early Americans, greed was good. "What we call love of gain," Tocqueville says, "is praiseworthy industry to the Americans."

This is the outlook summed up by that uniquely American phrase "rugged individualism," and it is still dominant in much of the country today. The American "common man" tends to believe in independence, individual responsibility and self-reliance. These people don’t want government interference in their lives, even if it’s billed as "help." And so they want smaller government, less welfare, less regulation — and it’s no surprise that they responded to Bush’s campaign rhetoric.

But there has also been a very different influence on American culture. This influence came from intellectuals educated at European universities — universities that produced thinkers such as Karl Marx. These universities drummed into their students the philosophy of collectivism.

In this view, the individual is irrelevant; collective social forces are everything. Individuals, Marx declared, must "enter into [social] relations that are indispensable and independent of their will." These social forces determine everything, including an individual’s ideas; men’s "social existence," as Marx put it, "determines their consciousness." This is the view, enshrined in today’s universities, that every issue boils down to a power struggle between social groups determined by "race, class, and gender." The only answer, in this view, is for these allegedly oppressed social groups to rise up — under the guidance of the educated elite — and seize control of the economy. After all, if the individual is helpless to control his own fate, he must rely on "society" to provide for his needs and to protect him with a vast network of government controls.

This collectivist viewpoint rules our nation’s universities — these days, it’s called "political correctness" — and it is the standard view of the liberal-arts-educated elite. These elites long for European-style socialism, and they clamour for bigger government, more regulation, more welfare, higher taxes. They heard these ideas echoed loud and clear in Gore’s class-warfare campaign rhetoric — and that’s why they refuse to accept a Bush victory.

That’s also why counting and recounting every vote in Florida won’t tell the whole story about what the American people want. This election wasn’t fought last Tuesday in the precincts of southern Florida. It was fought decades ago in the classrooms of the nation’s universities. And it is still being fought in our universities today.

That’s where those who are concerned about the future of the country should focus their attention. While individualistic Americans have created a dynamic free society and blazed a trail of innovation that pulls the whole world in its wake, the intellectuals who dominate our universities have condemned America’s values and indoctrinated generations of students in their collectivist ideals.

The two Americas who squared off in this year’s election are just a symptom of this fundamental gulf — this dangerous conflict between America and its intellectuals.

Robert Tracinski is a writer with the Ayn Rand Institute.

Lawrence Solomon
The National Post
March 13, 2001

By Joel Kotkin
Random House
 

In the digital age, will people need to commute to cities, and will industries be tied to transportation corridors and other locations? A smart new book, The New Geography: How the digital revolution is reshaping the American landscape, has answers for us, many of them compelling, all of them thought-provoking.

"By its very nature, the emerging post-industrial economy – based primarily on information flows in an increasingly seamless net – frees location from the tyranny of past associations," explains its author, Joel Kotkin. "Even such centres of gravity as Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, though possessing functions and allures that are mutually reinforcing, are increasingly not mandatory for the building a successful firm or career in finance, film, or the computer industry. Increasingly, companies and people now locate not where they must but where they will."

Many who hold such views have concluded that we are living in a largely placeless society, one in which it matters little where a company or its employees locate. Mr. Kotkin is not among them. It’s still location, location, location – more so than ever before, he affirms – only now the location will recognize that workers are becoming "sophisticated consumers of place" who gravitate to locales that suit their lifestyles. To attract them, companies must position themselves accordingly. Sometimes that positioning may demand a pastoral paradise offering year-round golfing or biking, sometimes a sophisticated city that offers culture, entertainment and man-made beauty.

To digital-age companies that live or die by their ability to attract and hold high-calibre talent, where to locate becomes a quality-of-life matter that trumps low taxes, lax regulations, cheap land and other traditional factors. "The primacy of this factor helps make expensive, highly regulated San Francisco and its suburbs among the wealthiest places in the nation and also explains why aesthetically unpleasant places such as Fresno, inexpensive and located in a highly fertile valley, rank near the bottom in terms of economic health," Mr. Kotkin elaborates.

Because talent creates wealth, wealth will accumulate where talented people cluster. And repeatedly in his book, Mr. Kotkin stresses the city’s superiority in attracting the most original among us. In describing Houston, he tells us of the "qualitative experience that only a central core can provide – restaurants, jazz clubs, the sense when people are out walking in the hot, humid, Texas night, that they are in a city, that they are somewhere." He quotes the founder of a New York-based multimedia software firm who explains that "You can put a chip firm in Boise, Idaho, but you’ll never have a major media play operating there. You can’t get the kind of creative people you need to move to Plano, Texas. They want to be somewhere they sense there’s action."

More generally, Mr. Kotkin affirms that "the new digital industries are largely sustained by interaction between specific groups who seek out and find one another uniquely in the urban milieu." Cities foster the intellectual exchange and trade that fuels prosperity, he says convincingly and often.

And yet he, himself, is not convinced, and he doesn’t clearly tell us why. Looking to the past and especially at the present, Mr. Kotkin’s analysis is unsurpassed – I have long admired him for his insightful "Grass Roots Business" columns in the Sunday New York Times, and consider him among the continent’s most perceptive writers about settlement patterns. But though he tries to peer confidently into the future, either his instincts or his analysis betrays him, and he slips into the conventional wisdom about where the city is heading.

He notes that demographics tilt to the city’s favour, with the children of the Baby Boomers outnumbering their parents by 2010 – "a new generation of young, single, unattached, and childless professionals who, in the past, have shown a proven proclivity for city living."

Yet he believes cities are doomed as economic engines and as homes for the middle class. Only Manhattan and Chicago – exceptions which he dubs magnificent anachronisms – have successfully resettled their urban core: "These two cities account for nearly one-third of all America’s downtown resident population," he writes, underlining the after-dark emptiness of America’s downtowns.

Yet why are they exceptions? Not because of immutable market forces, as readers might surmise, but because most city governments have circumscribed or banned downtown urban life. New York’s spectacular success at attracting downtown residents, for example, stems largely from the willingness of landlords and tenants to flout the law. Although New York’s official plan banned residential use of factories and warehouses, sky-high rents in legal apartments drove the rental market underground. City planners and politicians acted wisely – they turned a blind eye to the widespread illegalities, and then, after the law-breaking had become a fait accompli, they legalized the new living arrangements.

The list of exceptions would become exceedingly long if many of the cities for which Mr. Kotkin forecasts a dim future – Seattle, Miami and Philadelphia among them – stopped destroying their remaining neighbourhoods and heritage buildings, and started to deregulate their housing markets and commercial districts.

In this, there is hope. Many planners and politicians now understand the need to preserve special places, and to discard excess planning. If the digital revolution can spread the word a little quicker, the new geography could be decidedly urban.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 6, 2001

Just about everyone is hailing last week’s settlement over Ontario’s Oak Ridges Moraine – a strip of environmentally sensitive land locked in a decade-long development dispute that rims Toronto’s northern suburbs.

"Stunning, monumental and unique," exulted a representative of Save the Rouge, a local environmental group. "Premier Mike Harris … has seen the light," declared the Globe and Mail, echoing a widely held media view. "Sometimes we do get it right and this is one of those occasions," trilled Municipal Affairs Minister Chris Hodgson, the Tory Cabinet member overseeing the negotiations.

Even the opposition parties tipped their caps to the Mike Harris government. "I do want to say thank you to the government," applauded Marilyn Churley, the NDP’s environment critic.

The cheers are misplaced. The deal cooked up by environmentalists, local residents who oppose more sprawl, developers and the Ontario government – widely touted as "win-win" for all concerned – will burn both taxpayers and the environment at large.

Here is what Ms. Churley et al. give thanks for.

The developers who were betting (and, so far, losing) they would secure permission to build 8,000 homes against local opposition from well-heeled residents no longer stare at the prospect of losing their investment. The Harris government has swapped their insecure claim to developing the moraine for land of equal value elsewhere, to be developed with the government’s blessing. The cost to Ontario taxpayers of this rescue for the developers, coupled with a public park and other initiatives driven by the government’s need to save face, could top $250-million. Amazingly, federal and local taxpayers are expected to kick in equal amounts.

Neither does the deal represent a net benefit for the environment. Yes, the moraine should remain undeveloped, both on environmental and economic grounds – the developers would have depended upon free infrastructure and other government subsidies for their profit. And yes, sprawl is a major problem around Toronto. Government policies that have promoted a haphazard proliferation of settlements have spurred wasteful energy use, unneeded highways and the conversion of high-value, Greater Toronto Area farmland into mostly low-value tract housing.

But the Oak Ridges moraine deal, while protecting ground water, only worsens sprawl. The moraine – a long, slim strip of land – will not be a buffer against sprawl, as the deal’s defenders pretend. Future developers will merely leap-frog over it, as suburban developers everywhere have done for decades, leading to increased commuting distances. As if that weren’t bad enough, the deal gives the developers, as replacement land, prime farmland just east of Toronto – known as the Seaton lands – that was involved in one of the province’s bitterest environmental battles of the 1970s.

A generation ago, the federal government, thinking Toronto’s airplane traffic would climb ever higher, expropriated land for a major new airport over intense public opposition. When the government realized the airport – destined to be a Toronto equivalent of Montreal’s Mirabel – would be a boondoggle, it embarrassedly sought face-saving outs in partnerships with other levels of government. One that emerged out of the fog was a town – Seaton – that would be a politically correct model of environmentalism. Like the airport, it, too, never got off the ground. Neither did it balm the wounds or erase the memories of residents who had their lives uprooted by government bureaucrats deciding their fates from afar.

The Harris government, by dedicating part of the Seaton lands to the developers, seems poised for another push to make the Seaton mirage materialize. Another battle could be in the offing. The Seaton lands are themselves important environmentally, as a recent consultant’s report details, and they contain a sacred native burial site to boot.

"The same developers who found themselves in a fight over environmentally sensitive lands on the moraine are going to find themselves in the same kind of battles over here," a Pickering-area councillor warned. "Preserving the moraine is great, but we have become a casualty. … What they’ve done is swap environmentally sensitive land with environmentally sensitive land." The government hopes to head off controversy through "smart growth councils" but these will only add a layer of frustrating bureaucracy. Community groups in the Pickering area are already mobilizing for action. Another decade of fighting could be in the offing, culminating in another grand compromise and another victimized community.

There is a better way, in Ontario and elsewhere. After 50 years of extraordinary subsidies from federal, provincial and local governments, our countryside is massively overbuilt, so much so that many towns and suburbs strain merely to maintain their existing infrastructure. Rather than subsidizing the creation of new communities, also destined to be unsustainable, our governments should give tax rolls and the environment a rest. Let new towns be built if developers can do so without subsidy – they will almost never be able to – and let developers meet the public’s housing needs in a marketplace free of government manipulations – they will find themselves building overwhelmingly in cities.

Finally, the government should disband its plans for province-wide smart-growth councils. No one wants dumb growth, but the government record over the decades at Pickering, Seaton and Oak Ridges – a record duplicated in communities across the country – tells us that governments are ill equipped to deliver anything else.