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Recently a friend passed along a letter which appeared in the Aug. 29 edition of the Golden Transcript, signed by one Carl Raschke, senior fellow at one of Colorado's own think tanks, the Independence Institute.
The Independence Institute has done some work I respect, such as its effort to compile report cards for every public school in Colorado, but Raschke's letter is not among that work.
It's about as stupid and uninformed as anything I've ever seen in print.
Raschke argues against the Metro Vision 2020 plan
proposed by the Denver Regional Council of Governments.
That plan would try to limit the metro area to 700 square
miles. He calls it a social engineer's dream
which
mandates urban areas with higher-density housing and
retail facilities linked by rapid transit systems and
buffered with regional open-space areas.
Well, social engineers come in many varieties, and the
alternative apparently favored by Raschke -- more sprawl,
more freeways, more shopping malls, more parking lots, more
big boxes, more gasoline consumption, more smog -- is also
social engineering.
As James Howard Kunstler pointed out in his brilliant
book, Home from Nowhere,
the suburban sprawl mess is
also the result of government decisions and policies; that
is, social engineering
in the form of freeway
construction, zoning to produce isolated commercial islands
accessible only by auto, over-wide streets that lack decent
sidewalks, ordinances that prohibit affordable housing in
the form of mother-in-law houses and apartments over shops,
etc.
So, the choice is not between a social engineer's
dream
and the sound judgment and good sense
of
Coloradans, as Raschke puts it. It's more like a choice
between trying to make your community livable or allowing
the Asphalt & Gravel Lobby to control your environment
-- the horror of social engineering
will occur in
either case.
Nor is that the only place where Raschke is dead wrong.
He states that the appearance of a K-Mart where once
stood five cottonwoods by the crossroads keeps everyone
from the baker to the candlestick maker gainfully
employed.
Of course it does, if they go to work for the big-box
chain after it has put their small individual enterprises
out of business. That wrenching transformation certainly
doesn't keep intact the very social and economic
glue...
that Raschke promotes.
Raschke also observes that Anti-growth anxiety
dominated Colorado politics through most of the 1970s and
the first half of the 1980s. The policies of that period
are memorable only because they helped precipitate, in
combination with the decline of oil prices, one of the
worst and longest recessions in the state's
history.
First, the Metro Vision 2020 is not anti-growth. It
merely wants to channel growth into different patterns than
the patterns desired by Raschke and the Asphalt &
Gravel Lobby. He sets up a fake target, the anti-growth
advocates,
and then attacks it. That sort of sophistry
is better left to us columnists; I expect better from a
senior fellow at a think tank.
Second, Colorado boomed through the late 1970s, despite
the anti-growth anxiety
Raschke decries. Try as I
might, I can't think of a single policy from Dick Lamm
(then governor, and an eloquent articulator of
anti-growth anxiety
) which made mineral, fuel,
timber or grain prices collapse in the early 1980s.
The real culprit there is likely the deflationary monetary policies of the Reagan administration, and an honest scholar, rather than a shill for Republicans and shopping-mall promoters, might look into that.
Again, we should expect better from a senior fellow. If the Independence Institute is lending its name to Raschke's ignorance, sophistry and, especially, his advocacy of a certain form of social engineering while pretending to attack social engineering, then so much the worse for the Institute's reputation.
To change topics totally, we've had a shake-up in
Internet service up here. So if you want to e-mail me, the
new address is cozine@chaffee.net
-- messages sent
to the old address should be forwarded through the end of
the month, but I'm not sure that will always happen.
If you're one of those Macintosh zealots who wants to
attack my ancestry and intelligence, though, please use the
old address, or, even better, try something like
nada@nonesuch.net.
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