Jackson Street Rebel

I have long wanted the opportunity to write about local issues from a libertarian perspective, and, finally, I have it. My day job is editorial director of Antiwar.com, where I write a thrice-weekly column, and deal with earth-shattering events on an international scale. Yet all politics is local, to reiterate a bromide that is nonetheless true: I have long watched this city — or City, as we very parochial San Franciscans put it, as if this were the only city in the world — lorded over by a gaggle of the foolish and the sinister. The beauty of San Francisco is belied by the ugliness of its politics: for a city with such a forward-looking free-wheeling reputation, its politics are curiously conservative in many ways, none of them good.

For example: a friend of mine who is opening up a new coffee shop tells me of the horrendous burden of multi-agency applications, permits, fees, and numerous other obstacles to the growth of entrepreneurship. The City makes it easy for the homeless to live amongst us, inviting ne’er-do-wells from all over to the country to camp out permanently, but makes life hard for anyone actually trying to better themselves. Somebody once did a study of how many permits, permissions, and other special governmental tithes stood in the way of the growth of new businesses in Peru, I think it was: I forget the exact number, but I’ll bet San Francisco has more.

Socialism is dead everywhere but in North Korea, Nepal, and the Bay Area. The open hostility of government officials to business — that is, to the very concept of business, not just Big Business, or the Military-Industrial  Complex — is remarkable. And oddly archaic. Here NIMBY-ism reigns supreme, and the political and aesthetic ideal is pure stasis — a strange ideological stance for a city that likes to be known for its “progressive” values.

And as for Baghdad-by-the-Bay’s infamous social liberalism — or, rather, libertinism — why, it’s just a lot of talk. But that gets me into my second post, so I’ll break off here, except to say welcome, and be prepared to be lectured by the streetcorner libertarian – without a doubt a voice crying out in the ideological wilderness of San Francisco.