Bacon's Rebellion

I had planned to drop the Apology for Slavery theme — let’s talk about what we can do to improve the lives of all Virginians now instead of wallowing in the past — but the Times-Dispatch published a story yesterday that was so outrageous, I have to respond. Here is the lede paragraph of a story written by Olympia Meola and Pamela Stallsmith:

Del. Frank D. Hargrove Sr., who recently disparaged blacks and Jews with comments about apologizing for slavery, had a great-grandfather who owned a slave.

Unbelievable. Where do we begin?

Let’s start with the “scoop” that Hargrove’s 22-year-old ancestor owned a slave, a 60-year-old woman — a fact revealed by “a search by librarians at The Times-Dispatch and the Library of Virginia.” What does that have to do with anything? Does this fact somehow de-legitimize what Hargrove has to say about apologies for slavery? If so, does it de-legitimize anything that everyone whose ancestors once owned slaves have to say? According to family lore, one of my ancestors, living in Delaware, did own slaves but manumitted them in his will. Does that mean my views carry less weight — four generations after the offense — than the views of someone whose ancestors never owned slaves?

Even the T-D writers are vague about why it matters. They wrote (my italics):

Still, the family connection to slaves did not sway the lawmaker’s opinion. He maintains that he will not support a proposed resolution for a state apology for slavery because he did not own any slaves.

What’s the implication here? That, even though he decries the evils of slavery, Hargrove should be racked with guilt for the actions of a great grandparent? There are people in this country who seriously argue that certain criminals shouldn’t be held fully accountable for their own actions, as in, say, killing someone, on the basis of the He-Was-Depraved-Because-He-Was-Deprived defense. The result: One class of citizens should not be held accountable for crimes they themselves commit, while Del. Hargrove should be morally accountable for an offense that his great grand-father committed.

Then there’s the notion that Hargrove “disparaged” blacks and Jews. No, he did not “disparage” anyone. The T-D lede implies that he made remarks that were insulting, degrading or invidious. He didn’t do that: He made comments that some blacks and Jews from the opposing political party made a loud protest of finding offensive. You can disagree with the notion that blacks should “get over” slavery, but only someone who uses moral indignation as a political weapon would characterize it as “disparaging” of blacks.

Hargrove also likened apologizing for slavery akin to the idea of Christians asking Jews to apologize “for killing Christ.” How does that “disparage” Jews? The clear intent of his message was that Christians should, in fact, “get over it,” that the Jews did not owe an apology. Del. Yet David Englin, D-Alexandria, a Jew, misconstrued Hargrove’s statement as to suggest that he was repeating the charge of Jews as Christ Killers — the absolute opposite of Hargrove’s crystal clear meaning.

Of course, in his era of exquisite political correctness, the matter of historical fact need not even enter the debate. There is not one Christian who reads the Bible or recites the Nicene Creed who would deny that Jesus died at the hands of Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator of Judea. The slander of Jews as “Christ killers” derives from the fact that the High Priests of the Jerusalem temple arrested Jesus, interrogated him, delivered him to Pontius Pilate and then demanded that the Romans, who held the power of capital punishment, execute him. The early Jews never disputed this account. Within a few decades, as we can deduce from the rhetoric of the early Christian Jews, Pharisaic Jews were characterizing Jesus as a fraud and a sorcerer who had it coming. A few centuries later, the Jewish scholars who compiled the Talmud recorded oral accounts in which Jews within the Pharisaic tradition were quite happy to take full credit for executing Jesus — eliminating the intermediary role of Pontius Pilate altogether!

The problem (from our perspective) is not that the temple priests were culpable to some degree for Jesus’ death (a historical fact) but that later generations of Christians use the offenses of long-dead priests, who presided over a temple that had been destroyed by the Romans long before, to tar the entire Jewish faith. In other words, the Christians declared the Jews guilty for the sins of their ancestors.

Hargrove said that’s wrong. In a supreme irony, the T-D now implies that Hargrove is somehow guilty for the sins of his ancestors.

Virginia’s transportation crisis is largely a commuting crisis: traffic congestion encountered along the routes, and during the time of day, that people drive between home and work. This crisis is as much an artifact of late 20th-century social arrangements as it is a shortage of road capacity and dysfunctional land use patterns. As long as Virginia has a service-based economy in which most economic activity takes place in centralized places called “offices” at uniform times of day — usually 8:00 to 5:00 — congestion is inevitable.

Commuting habits arguably have gotten more uniform in recent decades, not less. Back when Virginia had a strong manufacturing sector, factories worked according to different shift schedules than the service sector. I remember living in Martinsville some 25 years ago when the American Furniture Company whistle would blow every 3 p.m. Growing up in Norfolk, I also remember how the streets would fill at 3 p.m. during shift change at the Navy Base. Those off-hour shifts may persist in places, but they are less prevalent than they once were. A large majority of Americans have settled into service-sector hours, crowding the same roads at the same time of day.

That’s why I harp upon the incipient revolution between worker and workplace made possible by cell phones, wireless laptops, virtual private networks and related technology. We’re seeing the early signs of reversal of the lemming-like rush hour migration. Organizations are becoming more flexible about where their employees work and when. I’ve written about this trend in a couple of places, including WORK magazine here in Richmond, as well as an electronic newsletter I produce for AgilQuest Corporation.

AgilQuest produces software and systems that measure office utilization and handles the scheduling for office sharing. Office surveys consistently show that the typical office desk is less than 50 percent utilized at any given time. Increasingly, people are spending their time in collaborative sessions in meeting rooms — or they’re not in the main office at all.

With AgilQuest’s permission, I am republishing three Q&A features I produced for the company’s newsletter, “Network of Space.” The first Q&A featured Mark Dixon, CEO of Regus Corporation, a company that offers hyper-flexible office space, including single cubicles and “hot desks” for people requiring one-man offices for very short periods of time.

This week’s Q&A features Jim Young, CEO of the RealComm conference company and an apostle of change in the real estate sector. Young, who takes people on intelligence-gathering trips to Europe and the Far East, says that the U.S. commercial real estate industry is a global laggard in adopting new technology. He believes that rising energy prices will accelerate the shift to tele-work and hoteling.

The implications of this tectonic societal shift both ominous and hopeful. Much of the office space being constructed today may soon become obsolescent. That’s bad news both for the property owners and the local governments that depend upon revenues generated by those properties for their tax base. But it may be good news for commuters. Not only is technology liberating many knowledge workers from the centralized workplace, but organizations are increasingly flexible about when they need to be in the office. Furthermore, visionary developers are providing entirely new categories of office product that cater to the mobile workforce.

The predictable consequence of these changes is that many people will alter their commuting patterns to avoid peak-period congestion. They have more flexibility than ever before to work at home, at the neighborhood Starbucks, at a client’s office, or in a new-generation tele-work center. Should Virginia ever adopt a regime of congestion pricing, Virginians would have greater flexibility than at any time in their history to alter their commuting behavior.

But public policy in Virginia has largely overlooked these changes. The state has made a nod to telework with some minor pilot programs. But the big money, as demonstrated by the latest GOP legislative compromise, continues to be funneled into massive road- and transit-building projects funded by taxes instead of tolls. There is minimal interest in congestion pricing. Politicians prattle about building a transportation sector for the 21st century but they employ the top-down, tax-and-spend methods of 20th-century socialism.

Sam Clay and his friends at the Fairfax County library system, compilers of our “Nice & Curious Questions,” column have departed from their usual deep dive into the offbeat, curious and eccentric in Virginia to recount their own bizarre tale. The Washington Post published an article inaccurately implying that library officials were purging their stacks of literary classics to make room for trendier stuff. An outraged reader wrote a post on the National Review blog, and from there, the misinformation disseminated literally around the world.

In the old days, exacting a correction from the Washington Post would have sufficed to quell the controversy. These days, once the horse is out of the barn… er, the book is out of the library, er, whatever… it is exceedingly difficult to correct the misinformation. The Fairfax library controversy is a fascinating warning about the perils of the Internet. The Post made the original mistake, but at least the mistake was correctable. Once bad information breaks into the blogosphere, it can circulate endlessly.

The Jan. 22, 2007, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion has been published. Don’t miss a single issue —click here to get it delivered free into your inbox.

Here are the highlights:

Power Play
Northern Virginia could face blackouts by 2011. But is it necessary to run a high-voltage transmission line through Virginia’s piedmont to avert them? Many questions remain unanswered.
by James A. Bacon

Investing for the New Economy
Meeting the demands of a globally competitive economy isn’t just a Northern Virginia priority anymore. Look what Harrisonburg. is doing.
by Doug Koelemay

A Conservative of Conscience
Jim Gilmore can win the GOP nomination for president because he embraces the conservative positions that appeal to Republican voters.
by James Atticus Bowden

Open Letter to GOP Delegates
Don’t believe for a minute that raising taxes and fees will help you hold on to your majority. As no new roads will be built for years, raising taxes now only guarantees to alienate voters.
by Phil Rodokanakis

Into the Fray
Media, the Web and a Virginia Library
by Edwin S. Clay III and Patricia Bangs

The United States as Margaritaville
This interview with Jim Young is the second of three Q&As with commercial real estate visionaries exploring the changing relationship between workers and the workplace.
by James A. Bacon

The Washington Post has published a must-read article about the nexus of ties between the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors and local developers. Michael Laris and David Fallis deserve major kudos for the kind of investigative journalism that has become all too rare in Virginia today. The article starts out strong and just gets better:

Six months after they took office in 2004, members of the Loudoun Board of supervisors demonstrated in a single afternoon their ability to help a friend.

First, they voted 6 to 3 to boost the number of homes that could be built on the family farm of Dale Polen Myers, a former supervisor who had been instrumental in getting many of them elected. The next month, a builder bought the property from Myers’s family for $12.2 million — four times its assessed value before the zoning Decision, records show., the board

Next, the board agreed unanimously to authorize the county to purchase a different parcel for $13.5 million, once again helping Myers, who was acting as the real estate agent. That earned Myers and her boss a commission that by industry standards would range from $270,000 to $675,000.

Such coziness has become routine among some Loudoun officials and a group of politically connected developers, landowners and others in the real estate industry, The Washington Post found in a year-long investigation.

Conservatives, Republicans and others who believe in small government and free enterprise, please take notice. This is not free enterprise. This is not respecting property rights. This is an example of what happens when government intrudes into the economy. It is no accident that the most dysfunctional areas of the United States economy — health care, education and real estate — are also the most heavily regulated and/or subsidized. It is no accident that the sectors most characterized by “rent seeking” activity (the manipulation of public power for personal, corporate or group benefit) are those very same sectors. And it is no accident that the development/real estate industry is the largest source of campaign contributions in Virginia.

As long as government has the power to redistribute wealth by favoring one person or group over another, people will seek to manipulate the levers of government to their advantage. That has been true across history and across every civilization advanced enough to have a government. It is human nature.

The answer is not giving local government more power in the hope that elected officials will wield it wisely. The answer is achieving Fundamental Change in our institutions of local governance that (1) reduce the incentive for rent-seeking behavior and (2) align the legitimate functions of government with the components of human settlement where services are most appropriately delivered.

Update: It gets worse. Here is the Post’s follow-up article.

Michael Shear with the Washington Post tells the story of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of Republican leaders in the General Assembly to overcome their differences and cobble together a compromise transportation “solution.” What comes through very clearly: Fear of retribution at the polls drove the compromise. Writes Shear:

Shocked by George Allen’s loss in last year’s U.S. Senate race and fearful of losing their majority in the elections this fall, the top lieutenants in the House of Delegates and Senate put aside years of philosophical differences and personal hostilities during closed-door meetings arranged and hosted by Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell (R).

The resulting legislative package, as outlined in this blog, was a bastardized hybrid of incompatible philosophies. The only good thing I can think to say about the financing piece of the compromise is that it avoids a statewide general tax increase. But if the regional components in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads are enacted, the deal would pump about $1.1 billion a year, plus $2 billion in bond proceeds, into a broken transportation system. Most of that money would be wasted, and the impetus for fundamental reform would be lost.

Legislators can respond that other pieces of the package will “fix” the system and ensure that the money is well spent. The land use reforms are a useful step in the right direction, but they are woefully incomplete. The VDOT reforms also are useful, especially the requirements for performance standards, which would prioritize transportation projects that actually mitigate congestion. But so many aspects of the transportation crisis remain unaddressed, as I’ve enumerated in previous posts, that the “fix” will go only skin deep.

The question now is how Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and his fellow Democrats will respond. There is much in the compromise they don’t like. It won’t take much opposition for the entire contrivance to collapse. But there is political risk: They won’t have much leverage in the 2007 elections if they torpedo the compromise. In a podcast analysis of the compromise on the Bearing Drift blog, J.R. Hoeft and Brian Kirwin suggest that the Dems have no choice but to go along.

I suspect that they’re right. Gov. Kaine is enough of a realist that he will hold his nose and go along, especially if he can get concessions on two things. One is a measure that would empower local governments to reject rezoning requests that would overload local transportation networks. Second is a measure that would create a fund for smart road projects.

But passage of the package is far from inevitable. It is the nature of compromises, that there is something in the package for everyone to dislike. It could unravel quickly if a powerful lobby like the home builders digs in its heels. I’m tempted to say that would be the best thing.

Jim Bacon will be staying on top of the “transportation / land use” issue with blow by blow postings. The MainStream Media and those standing for election in November call this “solving Virginia’s road crisis.” Others call it “the mobility and access crisis” which, along with “the affordable and accessible housing crisis,” have the potential, if not intelligently addressed, to continue the Commonwealth’s citizen on the path to economic, social and environmental Collapse.

The scope and details of the proposed “road” solutions will change from day to day during the current “short” legislative session. So will the arguments for and against each part of the ghastly omnibus / compromise package. Perhaps what is most useful at this point is a fresh way to present the true nature of the current “solution.”

Lets try this:

Suppose everyone in the Commonwealth depends on the Big Barn to shelter their resources and to provide for continued economic prosperity, social stability and environmental sustainability.

Lets us further assume that everyone agrees the Big Barn is in grave disrepair and if the political leadership of the Commonwealth does not do something they will be thrown out of office come November.

Upon careful review it is determined that just making the Big Barn bigger will not solve the problem. The Big Barn needs to be better and more resource efficient, not just bigger. The Big Barn needs a new foundation, better structural components and there must be a way to reduce the amount of stuff the Big Barn is expected to shelter for citizens, their enterprises and their institutions.

The reasons that these Fundamental Changes are necessary are based on the physical laws of barn construction / capacity, the economic laws of cost / availability of resources and democratic reality:

In a democracy with a market economy it is not sustainable for the Big Barn to only shelter the resources of those at the top of the economic food chain.

It turns out that the deterioration of the Big Barn has gone unaddressed because fixing it will gore the ox of those who make a big profit from Business-As-Usual. Anyone who puts forward a proposal for Fundamental Change in Big Barn management faces opposition from the special interests that pay for the political process. (See PROOF POSTIVE posting)

Any Fundamental Change proposals, and the those who make them, are doomed because education of the voters about the realities of the Big Barn have been thwarted by the Business-As-Usual interests.

In this context we can see how the legislative compromise to solve the mobility and access crisis looks a lot like a wonder cure for the Big Barn.

The grand compromise package for fixing the Big Barn is:

Charge all citizens a lot more money regardless of how much stuff they put in the Big Barn – a pure case of the tragedy of the commons.

Use taxes, fines and borrowed money to make the Big Barn bigger, using the same materials and the same designs that are now failing.

Paint the Big Barn a high tech color so it will look really good in November.

Add a new roof fabricated by the mobile home industry and paid for with the naming rights acquired by a smokeless tobacco product – in other words, a real public / private partnership.

Who will profit from the Big Barn repair job? The ones who have been kind enough to provide the bull for fund raising bull roasts.

Who will get hosed by the Big Barn repair job? In the long term every citizen of the Commonwealth.

It is very clear that without fixing the underlying problems and addressing the need to cut demand the whole New Big Barn will collapse. But not to worry, it will happen after the November election.

EMR