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.