RALEIGH – I will never be a communitarian.
It’s not that I don’t like strong, vibrant communities. That’s not what the term refers to. Communitarians are a discrete group of modern politicians and political thinkers who reject the individual as the methodological building block of political analysis and view Lockean natural-rights liberalism as either incompatible with human nature or at least outdated as an explanation for political behavior. There are Left-communitarians and Right-communitarians, but blue and red don’t exhaust the flavors.
Communitarians are collectivists of a bland and moderate sort. They don’t typically indulge in the large-scale, central-planning fantasies of Marxists, fascists, and other socialists. Theirs is the collectivism of small towns, of cultural preservation, of sign ordinances and housing codes. But it still rankles.
Consider what’s going on in the Wake County community of Knightdale. The town council just voted unanimously to set a cap on the amount of its housing stock that is subsidized and categorized as “affordable housing.” While the use of taxpayer funds to subsidize the affected projects may muddy the waters a bit, there is no doubt that Knightdale’s larger goal is to attempt to determine who will live in its jurisdiction, pay its taxes, and consume its services. Two years ago, the town specified that it wanted new single-family homes to be worth at least $185,000. And the current mayor, Doug Boyd, said that a major reason to restrict affordable housing is to keep the town’s crime rate from increasing.
Before you reflexively assume that the problem is simple racial or ethnic bigotry, stop and think for a second. Imagine that Knightdale were and would always be entirely monochrome. It is still likely that a significant number of residents might prefer to live in a community where there are few poor people and many wealthier ones. Their preference may stem from some kind of peer-effect hypothesis – their kids would get a better education in such a community, or be safer, or have more opportunities. Or it might stem from a desire, as is evident in Knightdale, to protect the market price of their homes. If these folks were willing to use government fiscal and regulatory policy to attempt to implement their preferences, they wouldn’t necessarily be bigots. But they would be, in a sense, communitarians.
And I would disagree. I’m an individualist. I recognize that individuals come into the world within a social context. I understand the importance of family, and of the role of social institutions and cultural inheritance in shaping identity and creating opportunities. I know there is something lasting about a community or culture that predates and postdates the life of any one person. And yet, I find indispensable the observation that at any one point in time, communities and cultures are formed of individuals, often very different individuals with very different and incompatible conceptions of the true and the good. I agree with Kant that individual human beings are ends in themselves, not simply means to achieving the ends of whoever happens to be in power at the time.
In the Knightdale case, people of modest income have just as much a right to purchase a home in the community as do other people – and business owners have just as much a right to build and market affordable housing in Knightdale as others do to build and market McMansions there. As to property values, individuals certainly have a right to protect their property against physical encroachment by others. But they have no right to a specific asking price for their home. If I move in next to you and fail to keep my lawn and garden precisely manicured, perhaps that will reduce somewhat the price you can command for your home in the future. But I haven’t encroached on your property. When governments set out to “protect property values,” that is no different conceptually from governments setting out to protect the price of corporate stocks through trade restrictions, or by blocking an innovation that would make an existing business lose its viability.
The debut of Google, for example, reduced the property value of people who owned stock in encyclopedia companies. Do they have a right to sue? Of course not.
So I’ll never be a communitarian. Life goes on.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.