Who Ya Gonna Subsidize?
Jim Henley is taking the week off of work to ... blog a whole lot apparently. Anyway, as one of the smartest political bloggers out there, heavy blogging from Mr Henley means tons of good thoughtful reading material for the world.
Jim tackles one of my personal long-time favorite hobbyhorses today in discussing the problem of bringing good, low cost grocery shopping to poor urban neighborhoods. Turns out that both government and major grocery chains are too inflexible and bureaucratic to deal effectively with the complexities of integrating into older, denser neighborhoods. Too often in situations like these, the government's power of eminent domain is abused to force landowners to sell against their will to a developer too lazy to do the hard work of assembling a large plot of land or creatively designing developments around problem properties. The existing smaller stores can't compete on price with the big chain so why would anyone argue that the neighborhood is better off without the use of the government's power to force the turnover of land at favorable prices to the chain? Well, as Jim points out better than I could, if you're going to subsidize someone, why not the people who are already serving the neighborhood?