The kindest month?
T.S. Eliot famously called April “the cruelest month,” for reasons I diagnosed a few years ago in this article. But away with such reminiscences!—for it’s time to recall the heady events of the Smarch just passed!
The dark side to historic preservation
I was asked to participate in a series of articles that Discourse is publishing about historic preservation. My contribution starts with a bit of a personal note:
This hits close to home, if you’ll pardon the pun. I was raised by a family of historic preservationists; my parents were the live-in caretakers at Heritage Square, a Los Angeles museum devoted to protecting old structures. Even after leaving that work, they have devoted themselves to restoring and maintaining 19th century buildings across the country. (They’re currently restoring an old brick mansion in Indiana.) I grew up in a construction zone, surrounded by architectural history and often hearing the slogan, “Old houses need love too.”
But there’s a downside to historic preservation. As Alex Tabarrok puts it, “if today’s rules for historical preservation had been in place in the past, the buildings that some now want to preserve would never have been built at all.” After all, life goes on—and as lovely as old buildings may be, they are not only expensive to maintain and repair, but they can also stand in the way of worthy innovation and necessary development. When the government orders historic preservation by law, the resulting costs are typically imposed on individual property owners in the form of expensive mandates—or on would-be owners, in the form of higher costs for housing.
Arizona Supreme Court agrees with Goldwater’s due process argument
It’s rare for a court to address a legal issue that is raised only in a friend-of-the-court brief, but that’s just what happened in the Legacy Foundation case a few weeks ago, when the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the state’s Clean Elections Commission violated Legacy’s due process rights. It was an issue the Goldwater Institute briefed, and the court found it decisive. You can learn more about that case here.
Child abuse registries and due process
Several months ago, I talked with the Parental Rights Foundation about a case I’m currently working on in which a mother in Tucson was charged with child neglect for allowing her child to play in a public park. You can listen to that podcast here, and learn more about the case here.
The Stasi poetry circle
I reviewed a book about a curious episode in which the East German secret police organized a creative writing workshop—starting in the sixties, but going on until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Excerpt:
When Becher ran the group, it included some young military men who, Oltermann writes, “had an irresistible urge to pen love poetry that paid little attention to political debates.” One soldier, for example, confessed in verse to being an “egotist / in love,” who hoped that his beloved would “be mine / just mine / and hope never / to be nationalized”—obviously an unacceptable sentiment in a collectivist state. Not surprisingly, Berger halted such gaiety when he took charge. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell said that in a totalitarian state, sex is a “political act”—because it is an assertion of individuality and of the individual’s right to his own happiness. Here, in miniature, is proof of his thesis.
Even more reminiscent of Orwell’s dystopia is the case of twenty-four-year-old Annegret Gollin, who was arrested in 1980 for a single poem written in a diary.
The three women who transformed freedom
Robert Tracinski published a nice review of my book Freedom’s Furies at Discourse the other day, which you can read here. He emphasizes a point that I thought was particularly interesting in the lives of Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand: that although they’re often treated now as being “conservative,” they were really anything but:
these women came up through the world of art and literature. Similarly, H.L. Mencken and Henry Hazlitt—the latter was a leading free-marketer of the time and a friend of the trio; he and Mencken would be fused into the crusading pro-liberty columnist Austen Heller in The Fountainhead—were both editors of the American Mercury. This was one of the prominent right-wing publications of the early 20th century but also one of its leading literary journals. Paterson was a key figure covering the book publishing scene in New York City, while Ayn Rand started out as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and later hobnobbed with studio executives and movie stars. These people were what you might call “coastal elites”—yet they argued for laissez-faire economics, promoted individualism and fought against the left.
I also talked with Jon Hersey of Philosophy for Flourishing about the book; Jon had some unusual and interesting questions for me. You can watch that here:
And I also got a chance to talk about these three fascinating ladies on Juliette Selgren’s Great Antidote podcast. And if that still isn’t enough for you, the Objective Standard folks posted the video of my presentation at TOS-Con last year, where I talk about the life and ideas of Isabel Paterson, and you can watch that here:
Phoenix’s “Zone” declared illegal
The judge in the “Zone” lawsuit—in which local business and property owners sued Phoenix for refusing to enforce the law in its open-air homeless shelter—declared the “Zone” a public nuisance a few days ago, and ordered the city to clean it up by July 10. For many months, now, city leaders have been using the Ninth Circuit’s Martin v. Boise decision as an excuse for refusing to take action here, and the ruling made clear why that’s not what the case actually said.
I wrote about the decision for Fox News yesterday, and you can read that here. Excerpt:
Phoenix leaders had claimed their hands were tied by a 2019 Ninth Circuit ruling that held that the city of Boise, Idaho, violated the U.S. Constitution’s "cruel and unusual punishment" clause by arresting people for sleeping on sidewalks. "Human beings are biologically compelled to rest," that court reasoned, so punishing them for "involuntarily sitting, lying, and sleeping in public" was cruel — akin to punishing them for "an illness or disease." If a city lacks sufficient bed space in its shelters to accommodate the homeless, the Ninth Circuit said, it’s unconstitutional to arrest them for sleeping on the streets.
But whatever one thinks about that case, it hardly applies to Phoenix’s situation, which doesn’t involve people "involuntarily" sleeping on sidewalks for lack of shelter space. The Zone’s residents are living there indefinitely, not because they’re biologically compelled to, but because they choose not to seek other arrangements.
I also talked with my friends Armstrong & Getty about the ruling, and you can listen to that here.
Gracias a la vida
This month’s music is “Gracias a la Vida,” which is a lovely humanist anthem notwithstanding it was written by one communist and is performed here by another: