I feel my last post needs a bit of clarification.

I was not and never have been arguing that the landowner has a just cause while the gardeners demands are unjust. I don’t think those distinctions are particularly meaningful or helpful. There are only better and worse choices nothing else.

Admittedly I do get pretty frustrated by the hypocrisy of the people demanding to use other people’s land to garden. As if they wouldn’t cry bloody murder if someone broke into their house and took their shit to give to people in the third world. Even if it was only their old LPs that they never ever play anymore. Short of bums and monks everyone in this country buys into the notion of private property and should at least understand why people feel upset when others take their shit without asking. If these people are willing to take the same attitude about what it’s fair for people in the third world to demand of (relatively) rich people like them as they do of even richer people I will eat my laptop. Even in berkeley and SF everyone I meet seems to believe that American’s come first.

The real point of my post was twofold:

First to point out that if your goal is more community gardens then the approach the people in both of these incidents have taken is extremely irrational. Whatever you thought of Horowitz’s behavior down in LA the best way to make sure other property owners would be likely to allow people to plant gardens on their property would have been to leave with the minimum of fuss and bother. This would make future property owners think they too could let people use their vacant land without fear that it will cost them.

In fact what would be best is for the community garden movement to create a set of standards about always trying to ask for permission first, always leaving without a fuss and so forth to reassure landowners. Just like the standards that govern camping (leave the place cleaner than you found it) and other groups who want to use other people’s land it is in your interest to reassure them that you won’t become a pest.

Secondly to argue once again that demanding particular things other people have that you want and using political or PR pressure to get them is not a good way to achieve public good in the long term. The reason so much of the modern world respects private property is because it leads to efficient economic development. Knowing that you own a particular piece of land and that shifts in public opinion won’t take it from you encourages you to develop that property. Allowing communities to just gain control of pieces of property arbitrarily and capriciously because they decide they want it (especially if it ends up costing the owner money) ultimately harms everyone in the long run.

Ultimately we do take from people to serve the public good. It’s called taxes. However, by being predictable and fairly distributed taxes allow us to take people’s money without as large a harmful effect to economic development or as much resentment. I think we ought to be doing a lot more for the public good so we ought to raise taxes. If you think more public gardens are worth the cost (whether to temporarily rent empty lots or to buy lots) then you should be lobbying for higher taxes and city programs to do just that.

If you aren’t willing (in general) to lobby and fight for higher taxes so we can buy these gardens with public money it seems you are tacitly admitting that the benefit from these gardens is not generally worth what they would cost. In other words they are only worth it when you make someone else pay the cost.

So whether or not the property owners were acting as perfect saints I am criticizing the behavior of many of the gardeners and their supporters for acting against their supposed long term interest. I am also rejecting the underlying idea that it’s reasonable to demand specific people or companies give charity for the public good. Instead we should ask what general policies are good and take from people in a fair uniform manner in order to support those policies.

So a couple days ago the SF bay guardian ran a story about a vacant lot in the city that people in the neighborhood had turned into a garden. The newspaper expresses bafflement that the property owner, upon visiting from out of town, demanded that the garden be removed and refused to discuss leasing the land. Though the article wasn’t clear on whether there was any offer to lease the land at fair market value.

It is easy to see why someone might be offended to find people using their land without even asking permission, especially if they demanded you let them continue instead of apologizing. However, what reason, other than pure indignation, might the property owner have to reject the lease? After all she isn’t using the land so even a below-market lease would benefit her and the gardeners would benefit as well?

Well perhaps the incident at the South Central Farm in LA provides an explanation. Now whatever you feel about the ultimate decisions of the landowner in that case and the ill-will that built up between the protesters and the landowner it is clear that having community gardens on his property cost him a great deal of money. While UC Berkeley’s status as a semi-public entity makes the situation a bit different you can see the same effect at people’s park. The longer a community, at least in places like SF and Berkeley, uses your land the more expensive it is to use your own property.

If the problem is vacant lots get a law passed about upkeeping them. If community gardens and other public spaces are really that important raise taxes and have the city buy the land. Also the more one demands that property owners let you garden their land the more incentive you give them to turn you down. The very fact that a petition was signed to continue this garden shows the landowner that in ten years when people have grown attached to that garden it will be very expensive to kick them out.

It really pissed me off when the most recent union announcement (I’m part of a grad student union here at UC Berkeley) contained the following language (emphasis mine):

The UAW and the University have reached a tentative one-year agreement that preserves our benefits and protections, guarantees our wage increase language through the 2006-2007 academic year, recognizes UC Merced as part of our bargaining unit, and gives us the opportunity to increase our bargaining power. We will spend the next year enforcing our rights under the contract, further mobilizing our membership, and working to defeat Governor Schwarzenegger this November and to ensure a pro-labor and pro-education majority in Sacramento and Washington D.C.

I’m not sure whether I support Schwarzenegger or not yet. It depends on who runs against him. If it is some idiotic protectionist but morally prudish democrat I would certainly vote for Schwarzenegger. I’m in favor of laws that benefit poor laborers and better education but I certainly don’t support the policies that go under the label ‘pro-labor’ or ‘pro-education’. Frequently ‘pro-labor’ policies institutionalize the advantage workers with a medium to high hourly wage have at the expense of worst off Americans and the truly poor in other countries. And unfortunately in this context ‘pro-education’ policies means cow-towing to the teacher’s unions. While some of the concerns teacher unions raise are quite reasonable (what happens to the leftovers if we adopt a voucher system) it is just human nature for teachers to view significant reform as a threat and we ought to take their positions with the same grain of salt that we take the prison guard unions views on prisons.

It is annoying enough that my money, and my implied support are being used to defend political causes I don’t support but it is even worse that my union is sacrificing real political bargaining power to do so. A smart company donates money to whatever candidate supports laws that will bring them lots of money, even if they don’t generally support pro-business laws. For instance I think you could count on MS donating more money to the tax and spend democrat who believes in buying every kid a computer (pre-installed with windows of course) than the pro-business candidate who opposes the program (assuming it is likely to pass). Though businesses can’t legally tie their donations to specific votes/programs by acting pretty rationally they make sure candidates have an incentive to throw them favors.

By committing to oppose Schwarzenegger and lobby for ‘pro-labor’ and ‘pro-education’ candidates, i.e., democrats, the union makes sure no politicians have an incentive to pressure UC to raise GSI salaries or to protect the money for grad programs from being siphoned off to handle the booming undergrad population. Democratic candidates know that they have our unions support no matter what and the republicans know they can’t get it even if they do good things for us. By refusing to behave pragmatically the union is not only wasting my money on causes I don’t believe in but also throwing away the very bargaining power a union is supposed to give us GSIs.

This has always been my problem with the arguments made against laws which would make donations to union political campaigns voluntary. Yes in theory unions should have the same power to lobby for benefits for their employees that corporations have to lobby for their interests. However, unions don’t use these donations to lobby for the benefit of their employees they use them to lobby for a certain ideology even when the interests of the group they represent are badly served by that position. Shareholders who found their money being used to lobby for things they didn’t believe in that actually hurt the company they owned would walk away but union members can’t do this. The reason unions, whose only power comes from a monopoly on a certain class of workers, are justified is the great difficulty in switching jobs because something you don’t like happens and this same logic shows union political donations to be coercive in a way corporate political donations are not.