Former Maryland Republican Party chairwoman Audrey Scott also attended, agreeing with other supporters that infrastructure is the key to economic growth and jobs. Scott also accentuated the need to safeguard transportation money, which too often has been tapped by governors from several administrations to plug other budget holes.

This has been interpreted by Michael Swartz, Richard Cross, and others as Audrey supporting an increase in the gas tax, and as such, a strong mark against her in her campaign for the MDGOP National Committeewoman spot.

If it’s true, then I’d have to agree that it’s pretty damning. But on the other hand, I know Audrey and I’ve seen the way she operated as MDGOP Chairman and it certainly didn’t seem in keeping with her, so I reached out to her for more clarification. This is what she had to say:

I wasn’t there to support a hike in the gas tax. I was there for one reason and one reason only – to speak out against Gov. O’Malley’s repeated raiding of the Transportation Trust Fund and to insist upon stronger protections for it so he and other tax and spend liberals can’t continue to do so.

When I agreed to attend the event, I was never told that calling for a gas tax increase would be any part of it and to be frank, I thought it was shameful to see others subverting what the rally should have been about – putting an end to wasteful spending and fiscal irresponsibility. Marylanders can’t afford a gas tax increase and I find it abhorrent that anyone could even consider imposing one.

Infrastructure is important to Maryland’s economic well-being, but the answer to fixing it isn’t raising taxes, it’s restraining spending and ensuring that the Transportation Trust Fund can’t be raided to fund O’Malley’s pet projects.

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It’s the right policy stance and it’s much more in keeping with all the things Chairman Scott has said and done in the past.

Plus, this is the Washington Post we’re talking about, an openly liberal paper that imports huge left-wingers like Obamacare cheerleader Ezra Klein – of course they’d take any opportunity to make it look like Republicans are getting behind a gas tax increase, even if the facts don’t back it up.

I don’t know if the others writing about the article bothered to talk to Audrey or not, but they ought to be ashamed of themselves if they didn’t. The GOP has enough problems of our own without parroting left-wing hit pieces from rags like WaPo.

However, I did want to add one little aside on the topic. I was listening to some music recently and this song came up.

While the song addresses central planning and the economy more generally, it hits upon every idea I made in my three articles and it does so in both easier to understand and more entertaining fashion.

I discussed my recent series on PlanMaryland with the hosts Andrew Langer and Mark Newgent; besides that Del. Kelly Schulz was on to discuss the upcoming MD legislative session and Mark, Andrew, and I discussed the MDGOP and the race to fill the national committeewoman seat now that the current holder, Joyce Terhes has announced she will not be running for reelection.

Special thanks also to Marie Bernadette for the chatroom interaction during the show!

Be sure to check it out, you can listen to the audio or watch the Ustream video of the episode, both can be found here.

Part II was devoted to explaining how PlanMaryland is the natural culmination of individuals allowing the state to take the first steps into planning land use policy via zoning laws.

This final piece in the series is intended to be a preemptive response to the Chicken Littles who insist that without planning we would face horrible disasters, that we’d lose all of our open space or that the economy would crash or other equally horrendous visions.

First and foremost, I want to address the claims that government planning of land use policy is a necessary component of an orderly society and a functioning economy. Anybody who claims that is either lying or ignorant.

I know it’s a strong claim, but it’s a true one and we can know that because it’s been tried. Not only was it tried, it worked and has continued to work. Where you ask? Texas.

For all the talk of the “Texas miracle” on employment numbers, the real Texas miracle is in land use policy. In the Lone Star State counties are prohibited, by force of law, from implementing zoning codes and the state has shown no real interest in implementing anything of the sort at the statewide level. In fact, the only areas that have zoning controls in Texas are municipalities, and not even all of them have zoning codes.

And how has that turned out? In two words, quite well. By severely limiting the capacity of the government to plan land use policy Texas has ensured that it has a highly elastic housing supply that responds to shifts in the market faster and more efficiently than it did in other states. This in turn has had several positive impacts.

As former Center for American Progress staffer Matt Yglesias has observed, when government refused to use land policy controls to artificially limit the housing supply it resulted in much more affordable housing opportunities. Those prices helped draw people to Texas and thus ensure a better economy and lower unemployment through increased population growth:

What differentiates Texas from the rest of the United States isn’t an immunity to recessions, it’s a systematically higher population growth rate. That gap predates President Obama, predates the recession, and it predates Rick Perry, so I don’t think it tells us anything about any of those things. It’s driven, I believe, by proximity to Mexico and relatively cheap housing. This is to Texas’ credit. National living standards would be higher if the Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland MSAs along with the whole Acela corridor from Boston to Washington would adopt more robust Texas-style policies to increase the housing stock.

In addition to the key benefit of allowing the economy to grow, a lack of land use policy has also helped to insulate the Texas economy from the volatility that has rocked the rest of the country.

The above chart is the FHA’s Housing Price Index for Texas and Maryland running from 1992-2011. As you can see, Texas fared far better than my own state; by allowing the market to set the housing supply rather than government Texas largely avoided both the real estate bubble and the inevitable crash that followed when it popped. The evidence is clear – it is not returning control of land use policy to land owners that puts our economy in the hands of property speculators, it’s putting the control in government hands that threatens to derail our economy.

And the people of Texas recognize this. If government planning were as much of a no-brainer as its supporters claim it to be, then one would expect the people of Texas to resent their current policies. But that’s not the case. In Houston the voters have had three opportunities over the years to implement zoning and each time have soundly rejected it, most likely because they recognize that keeping government control over land use policy strictly limited is the secret behind Texas’ economic and job growth.

Moving away from claims of economic catastrophe, it’s my understanding that preserving open space is among of the arguments for PlanMaryland made by its proponents.

Unfortunately for them the claim that not having government plan our land use policy will lead to the complete destruction of open space is pure nonsense, nonsense that only makes sense if you suspend the basic laws of economics.

The issue is scarcity. The more that land gets placed into use (or bought up by conservationists intent on seeing it remain the way it is), the less land there will be available to meet demand. And as Econ 101 teaches us, when supply is reduced but demand stays constant, the result is increasing prices. Eventually the prices for raw land will reach an equilibrium where the natural price is too high to justify purchase for development.

The effect of this simple fact is amplified when one considers the degree to which current land use restrictions limit density. Most people like to live where there are other people and more services, opportunities, etc. available. That means building where there already is building. So why don’t people build there if the demand exists? For the simple reason that zoning laws and other restrictive land use policies prevent them from doing so.

From Matt Yglesias again:

If you go up to the Columbia Heights Metro station and then walk east just a block east you’ll be struck by the hard transition from the large-for-DC new apartments on 14th street and the low density structures right around them. What’s going on, you’ll wonder. What’s happened, simply put, is that you’ve moved out of an area zoned C-2-B and into an area zoned R-4. In R-4 areas, (including almost everything north of Euclid between 14th Street and Georgia Ave, pretty much the entire square between P, U, 14th, and 7th and many other parts of the city) you can’t build a house taller than 3 stories (or 40 feet), you can’t occupy more than 60 percent of your lot, and you can’t build apartments smaller than 900 square feet per bedroom.

As a result, even though these places have become much more desirable places to live, they simply aren’t allowed to accommodate very many additional residents. Instead of seeing new, denser construction to allow more and more people to live where they’d like, we see zero sum battles over “gentrification” as working class residents can’t afford new, higher rents. Meanwhile, the central city’s inability to accommodate all the people who’d like to live there puts enormous price pressure on the closer-in suburbs, pushing people who want the suburban lifestyle ever-further from the city center in search of affordable housing.

Once again, the evidence is clear. It’s not a lack of regulation and government control that is driving sprawl and leading to the loss of open space, it’s the policies themselves that are doing it. We need to have a little trust in individuals ability to make decisions for themselves so that, via their free choices, market forces can determine the real dynamic housing stock needed and in doing so both create better places to live that meet actual people’s real desires and still preserve open space.

This brings me to my final and really my most important point. When control of land use policy is taken from the land owners and put into the hands of government what it ultimately amounts to is, whether they be NIMBY neighbors or eminent domain wielding land grabbers, giving the powerful and well-off control over land use.

This inevitably is bad for the weak and least-well-off among us. In either case those who are well-off have more time to push for policies to their benefit, more knowledge of how to work the system, and more direct incentive to manipulate things in their favor. In contrast, the young, the poor, immigrants, and others less well-off are too busy trying to get by to speak out at hearings, they don’t generally have the knowledge necessary to fight if they did have the time, and more often than not, as people seeking the join the community of an area it’s easier to simply try and find somewhere else to live rather than fight against a system stacked against you.

The end result is that existing property owners are able to ensure stasis in the housing supply, stasis that drives up both housing prices and rents and drives out those disadvantaged types – the young, the poor, immigrants, and others who can’t afford to stay.

And that’s not even touching on the more insidious ways people use land use policy controls as ways to promote their own interests against less popular minorities.

Zoning laws are not limited to construction and development. They can control the smallest details and nuances of an owner’s use of his property, and they can be used for nefarious purposes even beyond the immediate violation of property rights, such as “banning” unwanted individuals. For instance, the city council of Manassas, Virginia, passed a zoning ordinance that restricts residence in households to immediate relatives, thus excluding aunts, nephews, cousins, and other members of the extended family—and the council acknowledged that the ordinance targeted Hispanics, who apparently were not wanted in the area.

And that is ultimately why I support returning land use policy control to the people. All of the other arguments are important, but the fact is that it’s wrong for existing home owners to be able to game the system to their own benefit and to do it on the backs of those least able to afford it and least able to fight back.

Taking back control of land use policy will lead to more robust property rights, reduce government intrusion into our lives, create a more efficient economy, and enable housing that better suits people’s needs and desires, but more than anything, the real benefit is that it will put everyone on equal footing to participate in the housing market instead of letting the rich and powerful use government to enshrine themselves as the winners.

However I also made the more controversial claim, that Gov. O’Malley doesn’t deserve all the blame for implementing such a foolish plan, that we all need to take ownership of this folly.

To understand why, look back to our friend the pencil. Remember how complex the process of his manufacture is? And think about how much more complex it is therefore to make something much more complex, like a house or a community.

Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek had many great insights, but his greatest insight was with regards to the astounding complexity of our economy, the ways in which it spontaneously ordered itself, and the folly of trying to centrally plan that economy.

Simply put, Hayek’s great insight was that the economy, and even small sectors of it, are too complex to be centrally planned. The myriad needs and desires of all the individuals who make up the economy simply present too many variables to be accounted for by any person or board.

As a result, when such central planning is attempted, it will inevitably fail. Planners will allocate too little in one area, too much in another, ignore people’s desires and instead force their own preferences. And when the planning fails, how do the planners respond?

Once in a blue moon, they recognize their mistake and roll back their initial planning, allowing the spontaneous ordering of the market to address the issue. More often though, they insist the failure was not theirs, that all that is needed to fix the problem is yet more planning.

In this way, planning begets yet more planning, and what started as relatively minor and benign escalates into massive assaults on individual liberty.

The situation is no different here in Maryland. PlanMaryland did not emerge out of whole cloth from the ether. It is the product of a natural evolution that began the day Marylanders accepted government planning of land use policy via zoning laws and other ordinances controlling land use policy.

Had we protested earlier, refused to accept the lesser invasion of private property rights, then we would never be facing the much larger assault that is PlanMaryland. But it’s not too late, we can fight off PlanMaryland, but we can’t stop there, we need to continue to push forward and rollback zoning ordinances, comprehensive plans, and all the other intrusions on the free exercise of private property rights in Maryland.

And contrary to what some might say, not only can a place survive without government planned land use policy, it can thrive. I’ll explain that in Part III.

It’s been declaimed as part of a War on Rural Maryland, an example of executive overreach, an assault on private property rights, and an effort to undermine local planning boards. All of these are true characterizations of PlanMaryland, but they’re also all wrong.

Alright, they’re not exactly wrong. But they miss the real problem and in doing so the obscure the real issue with PlanMaryland. Simply put, the real complaint against PlanMaryland isn’t what it proposes to do, it’s that it proposes to do.

Take a moment and pick up one of the pencils that is undoubtedly on your desk. Consider it for a moment. Just how did it come to be there?

This is a question explored in the famous essay “I, Pencil.” As Leonard Reed, its author explains, not a person in the world knows how to make a simple pencil. Simply obtaining the raw wood alone is a monumental task, requiring the coordination of hundreds of people and skills – not just to cut the wood, but the mine and smelt the saws and other tools, to grow hemp and make it into rope, to run and maintain the lumber camp, even to make the coffee the lumberjacks drink.

As a simple a task as that would seem, it only continues to grow more complex. To transport the wood, to mill it, to fill with graphite and finish the pencils, to ship it to stores across the world, to produce the energy that powers all of this and to generate the capital that finances it all – all of this involves the unplanned coordination of untold thousands and thousands of people.

With such awe-inspiring complexity, what person in the world could ever make a pencil on their own. And in a vacuum, without the way having been shown first, what person or even group of people could ever centrally plan the process? What minds could ever conceive of, much less manage such an intricate and intertwined system, one that spans not just countless humans across the globe but across time as well.

The answer is simple, none could, and only a fool would think they could.

But if the creation of a pencil is such a complex process, how much more complex is a whole house. And how much more complex a community, or the network of communities we call counties? And for someone to think that one person or even a committee could mastermind the collection of counties we think of as a state?

What hubris. What bald-faced arrogance.

But, in spite of his egotistical belief that government is up to the task of capably managing a system of such infinite complexity, Gov. O’Malley doesn’t deserve all the blame. We all need to accept our share as well. I’ll explain why in Part II.

Chiefly the trouble lies in the fact that most every conservative claims they are supporters of individual liberty and limited government, but then toss away those concerns the moment it involves liberty for someone they don’t approve of, whether they be gays, immigrants, Muslims, or other unpopular minorities.

Mostly I’ve focused on immigration and how many on the right so easily reject the free market in order to subsidize American labor interests. This time though, I want to focus on another aspect of so-called conservatives enabling statism.

In a recent post Ann Corcoran of Potomac Tea Party Report responds to a report highlighting incidences of police brutality by cavalierly dismissing it as so much political agitprop from the Left.

This is unconscionable if you honestly believe in limited government. I care about things like the tax code and land use policy, and I certainly recognize how the state uses them to restrict individual liberty. But the police being free to brutalize innocent people and even to egregiously violate the civil rights of actual criminals is a massively bigger threat to individual liberty.

And contrary to Corcoran’s implication, this isn’t something that was made up by the Obama administration or George Soros or some other bogeyman leftist.

I spent about 5 minutes on investigative journalist and libertarian activist Radley Balko’s site and found the following:

• Over 380 cases of police breaking into people’s homes and terrorizing the occupants while doing no-knock drug raids. These incidents frequently feature physical harm being inflicted on occupants and put both young children and elderly relatives at risk. In virtually every case they either found only miniscule amounts of marijuana or actually had hit the wrong house.
• Over 320 cases of police shooting people’s dogs when the dogs posed no threat to the officers. In many cases people pleaded with the officers to allow them to pen the dogs or otherwise restrain them but the officers refused to do so and shot the dogs instead.
• Something like 700 cases of police getting away with flagrant violations of the law either because other police officers refused to enforce the law against them or courts refused to consider as valid testimony that contradicted the claims of the offending officers.

Spend a bit of time reading through the linked material. It’s horrifying to think that this sort of thing happens in America today. We’re a far sight better than places like North Korea, China, or the various authoritarian tyrannies of Africa and the Middle East, but the state is still egregiously violating individual liberty in the United States and in ways a whole lot worse than excessive marginal tax rates.

Just because those abuses aren’t terribly visible to people like Corcoran or myself it doesn’t mean they aren’t real and it certainly doesn’t mean that they aren’t an issue that limited government advocates ought to be outraged about.

There’s a huge problem with the piece though – it’s entirely assumed that America actually does welcome immigrants. The fact is, this country does not welcome immigrants.

The evidence of America’s hostility to immigrants is overwhelming.

There’s the individual examples of course, like Andres Lopez, who was “guided into a wall” of his home by federal immigration officers.

And then there’s the case of Air Force Staff Sergeant Luis Magana and his wife Karina, a permanent resident who nearly got deported as a result of her naturalization interview. Apparently she had accidentally misfiled some of the paperwork and the government processed it (knowing it was incorrect) only to accuse her of fraud when she applied to naturalize and become a U.S. citizen. She and her husband (who was about to be deployed when this nightmare began) spent the next 2 years in terror she would be deported because of an innocent mistake and bureaucratic incompetence, but luckily a competent immigration lawyer was able to come to the family’s aid and she has been able to finally resume the naturalization process.

These aren’t just isolated incidents. They’re part of a broad mosaic of hostility and ill-treatment of immigrants in America, an injustice that stems squarely from our byzantine, hopelessly complex web of immigration laws and the mainstreaming of attitudes that immigration is a problem for America and that we are too permissive of immigration and immigrants.

Sure, as Anderson’s post and other (usually) anti-immigrant commentators note, the U.S. accepts more immigrants than any other country in the world. But that doesn’t change the insane and illegitimate barriers we put up to the legal immigration process. It isn’t ok for a man to beat his wife just because all his neighbors break their wives’ legs – being less bad is never a justification for being wrong and it certainly isn’t a goal to strive towards.

I support the passage of that amendment. I can talk about a lot of reasons why. I could talk about property rights, or savings to consumers, or reducing gas costs for Queen Anne’s County residents, or all sorts of other sound, but abstract reasons. But that’s not what I’m going to highlight, at least not right now.

What I’m going to highlight is a simple, personal anecdote.

My wife and I have a young son. Since she works and we’re not keen on using formula, she pumps milk to  be fed to him while she’s gone during the day. Well this past Sunday evening, the electric pump we rely on for that stopped working. And that highlighted for me, in simple terms, the benefits of having big boxes.

Is there a small, local business that carries electric breast pumps? Maybe.

But how long would I have to scour through the phone book to try and figure out what place that is?

And even if it exists, and I succeeded in finding it, what are the odds it would still be open at 6:30 PM on a Sunday?

In contrast, with a big box store like a Wal-Mart or a Target, one can count on them to carry something like breast pumps and you can count on them be open well after a small local business will have closed for the day, regardless of the day of the week.

Rural character and local charm can count for a lot, but when it comes down to it, accessibility and reliability count for a lot more in my book and most other people’s too.

Immigration Reform Imperative for Economic Growth

Senate Subcommittee Hearings Confirm Economic Necessity of Immigration Reform

Washington, D.C., July 26, 2011 — The Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security held hearings today highlighting the economic importance of immigration reform. The economic benefits of immigration are underappreciated according to Policy Analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Alex Nowrasteh.

“Removing barriers to legal immigration would be an enormous benefit to our economy,” said Nowrasteh. “Immigrants of all skill levels, from the highly skilled to the lower skilled, create jobs and economic opportunities for Americans.”

In a recent report published by CEI, Nowrasteh highlights the enormous benefits of highly skilled immigrants:

“Highly skilled immigrants and workers are typically well educated, English speaking, and young.  They are well paid, do not take many government benefits, and are not prone to criminality.” “Because the skills of highly skilled foreigners are different from Americans, there is little direct competition between them and natives. In fact, they work well together and increase productivity.”

The hearings today invited experts and industry representatives to testify on the benefits of immigration. “Creating legal pathways to immigration like our ancestors enjoyed would quickly make the unauthorized immigration problem evaporate. The goal of any sensible immigration reform should be to increase legal immigration of non-violent and healthy people. Restrictions should be only limited to accessing the welfare state, legitimate security, and health concerns,” said Nowrasteh.  “Recognizing that immigration is a net economic benefit is the first step toward taking real reform.”

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CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.  For more information about CEI, please visit our website at www.cei.org and blog, Openmarket.org.

I don’t have much to add, but will note this is particularly timely as WordPress ate a post I did over the weekend about the revival of Know Nothing sentiment in the United States. I’ll be attempting to recreate it and post it sometime this week.