My neighborhood, West University Place, is a small, self-contained little island of a city within Houston. It’s only about 2 square miles; but it’s fairly densely packed, about 10,000 families. Unlike Houston proper, West U has zoning. And most of its residents like it this way including, I confess, yours truly.
A recently passed ordinance (sec. 15.011) prohibits door-to-door soliciting in several cases: too early or too late; for any unregistered solicitors; or where the homeowner has a “no soliciting” sign posted. Now it’s been amended to provide for a “do-not-disturb list,” which lists addresses of residents who have indicated that commercial soliciting is not welcome.
Now personally, I like these rules. But are they consistent with liberty and property rights? It seems to me they are.Property owners have the right to exclude, or to permit (“license”), others to enter or use their property. There is normally a presumption that neighbors and others with peaceful purposes in mind can walk up to your door and knock on it, e.g. to borrow a cup of sugar. They have implicit license. There is a presumption in an area based on conventional usage and tradition, etc. But I can change this, e.g. by telling someone they are unwelcome or posting a sign. And there is no implicit permission for girl scouts to knock on my door at, say, 4:00 a.m. to sell me cookies; in such conditions the presumption is the other way around.
This ordinance seems to me to largely reflect libertarian principles. It prohibits soliciting too early or too late. It prohibits soliciting those who have made it clear they don’t welcome it–they don’t give permission for this use of their property (by means of a sign or signing up to a public, easily accessible list). It even makes an exception for those under 14 years of age, because most of us would not want to keep our neighbors’ kids from coming by to ask for donations to the Little League or selling girl scout cookies.
Of course similar comments could be made about spam (as I have done before). If you have a publicly accessible or known email address, the presumption is people can email you to send you a message. But you could rebut it for a specific person, like someone stalking or harassing you. Because sending an email to me is a way of using my computer, since it causes certain physical things to happen to my computer. Therefore you have to have my permission, at least tacit, to send me email. In my view, there should be no need to sign up to a “do-not-spam” list, since the presumption should be that nobody wants all that spam, unless they explicitly welcome it.
{ 12 comments }
This is tricky. The City of West University Place is a political subdivision of the State of Texas. It is run by politicians who fall back on the State to legitimize their positions. The Woodlands, by way of contrast, is an unincorporated area of the county. It is run by politicians, to be sure, but they do not so directly rely on state power. I would say that ordinances in West University Place are inconsistent with liberty and property rights, while “ordinances” in The Woodlands are more consistent. In The Woodlands, the social contract is replaced with an actual agreement that residents sign annually.
Stephan,
On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, this legislation gives more power to the State, which is, a priori, not a good thing.
I don’t think libertarians have any problem with people mutually agreeing to rules and ordinances as you propose. Where I live, many subdivisions have “covenants” you agree to when you move in, restricting what you may do on your property (“do not log more than 50% of the trees”) and what sort of home you may build (“no mobile homes or trailers”). This sort of voluntary contractual arrangement can only work on the immediate local level, however.
There’s also nothing wrong with restricting who may come up and knock on your door, and when they may do it, since it is your property.
Also, I feel the need to mention, regarding SPAM, that there are extremely effective free market solutions that have nothing to do with the State, such as dpsam ( http://tinyurl.com/r5kw ).
The law seems to be redundant because it simply duplicates what could be derived from property rights. The trouble is that the state is claiming credit for what it did not create. The rules are consistent with property rights. It’s their origin that isn’t so delighting, as purveyed by the state.
Just a comment on the math there: if there are 10,000 families there with an average of only 3 people per family in a 2-square mile area, the population density in that city is … the highest in the world.
Woops, you’re right. I had it wrong. It’s not 10,000 families, it’s 13,200 people living in 5,600 homes, in a 2 square mile city. Still pretty dense. Most houses sit on a 50′x100′ lot.
They have something in common – What if you have a violator who ignores your sign. Assume no ordinance, but a simple right to put a “No Trespassing, Soliciting, etc.” sign up. Someone violates it. What are your damages? $5? How much would it take to bring them to court to collect? Do they pay court cousts? Do they not show up and you now have to find them to collect (they tend to be anonymous as spam for the purpose).
You rely on an ordinance to increase the penalty to make it uneconomic to engage in annoying behavior. But that principle can be extended to behavior you do that someone else thinks is annoying – and they might not like that a privacy fence blocks their view, so you can’t do annoying things on your own property?
My problem with Spam is that it tends to be fraudulent (no one comes to my door saying they went to high school with me). Or obscene – What if I didn’t knock, just left obscene sample pictures in the open for everyone to see with an invite where you could see more?
Then there’s the worms and viri – I knock and somehow either find info or determine how to bypass your lock for when you are gone.
Stephan, since you confess to liking zoning (I like it in some mild forms as well), I thought I’d jump on that comment and note that, as far as I can tell, there is certainly nothing free-market about zoning at all. Everywhere I’ve seen it used, it is primarily done to drive up property values for select current owners at the expense of all future owners, and of those who don’t want to use their land in government-approved ways.
Governments use it to ensure that property owners cannot sell their property to businesses or persons that the present government does not deem desirable, i.e., no housing or services for poor people, since such things do not bring in more tax revenue for the local government. In other words, people can’t use their property as they wish, and can only sell with the approval of the local government.
Zoning is pretty much in the tradition of unionism and protectionism with the added “benefit” of bringing in more tax revenue.
Let me be clear about a few things.
1. Whether I “like” zoning or not in my own neighborhood does not mean I say it’s justified. I might secretly get pleasure out of seeing democrats get taxed, but does not mean taxation is legitimate.
2. I was not claiming that it is justifiable for my city to have and enforce such a law, I was only asking whether the law itself is libertarian. A law against murder is not incompatible with libertarianism, for example, even if the state has no right to arrogate to itself the jurisdiction to enforce that law.
3. Re spam: my guess as to the eventual solution to spam is this. Some big ISPs (or those in a big jurisdiction like the US) start to demand that all ISPs from which they accept email sign on to certain anti-spam standards. For example, let’s say a Bahamas based ISP has a bunch of spammer customers. Seems to me this ISP is in the best position to stop spam–by
charging a penny per email (above 5000 a year, something like that), or whatever. If they don’t, then legitimate ISPs simply refuse to take eamil from them. That makes this Bahamas “rogue” ISP unattractive to customers, since their email can’t be received by all the
people out there using legitimate ISPs.
(The legit ISPs could each pay a small fee to pay the expenses of some spam watchdog group, who would report on “rogue” ISPs adherence to certain anti-spam standards etc.)
I wonder why this is not yet happening? It does not seem to me that it requires government action, so I wonder why a few of the dominant ISPs (AOL, rr.com, msn.net etc., those who suffer costs due to all the clogging spam traffic) have not yet done this?
There are methods of dealing with unwanted solicitations, that are more consistent with liberty than uniformly restricting them. The point is that the cost should be commensurate with the estimated benefit and that everyone should be able to set their own limits.
A solicitation notice may be such as “$1 per answered commercial solicitation before 8 pm, 5$ after, refundable at the option of the owner.” Everyone should be able to set their own price, depending on how highly they value their time versus how much they are interested in the products on offer.
This policy also works for spam, if you could set the price of the first communication with someone (your time is your property), you would either drastically reduce the quantity of spam or you would not care because of all of the money that you are gaining from it.
Microsoft claims to be working on just such a system.
I think zoning through a political process is inherently un-libertarian as its an attempt to regulate property that is not owned by the regulator. The libertarian solution is for corporations to own subdivisions and set the zoning laws on their own property. Those that lease that property must abide by the rules.
Note: Even if you “bought” the property from the corporation along with the contractual agreement to abide by the zoning laws that is still fundamentally a “lease” as you do not fully own the property, i.e you cannot do with it as you please and construct a 1,000 foot high fence.
The interesting question is what would occur if the corporation that “leased” (sold with contractual restrictions) ceased to exist? I think another corporation would have to buy the subdivision asset. Any political process initiated by those leasing to abolish the previous contract would be illegitimate as a neighbor could suddenly find his property next to a 1,00 foot wall on one side and a gas station on the other. No changes could occur to the previous zoning contract without 100% approval, even if that means buying out dissenters. Libertarian contract would likley evolve to include such clauses.
Comments on this entry are closed.