The Synergy Of Harry Reid

THE PEOPLE of Nevada have a problem. About 90 percent of the land in the state is owned by the federal government. This makes it difficult for them to develop land for homes, schools, offices, and strip malls, the infrastructure they need to support their families.

But they are not fools. They have elected to the United States Senate a man with the skills not only to untangle their Social Security benefit problems but also to provide them with the land they need, a man with the cojones to wrestle with bureaucrats, zoning boards, and rich environmental groups and force them to surrender good Nevada land for the beneficial use of Nevada families.

In the corporate sector, this is called synergy.

Recently, the synergistic work of Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has come under public scrutiny. On October 11 Associated Press reporters John Solomon and Kathleen Hennessey detailed how Reid, with considerable skill, managed to get a parcel of land on the outskirts of Las Vegas rezoned from residential into a shopping center. And a blogger, AJStrata, showed that Senator Reid is no amateur. Clark County, Nevada, has recorded numerous real estate transactions in recent years involving Harry M Reid.

Like most working people, Harry Reid likes to be compensated for his trouble. In the Vegas land deal, “Reid took $1.1 million of the proceeds, nearly tripling the senator’s investment” of $400,000, according to the AP. Some people call this kind of profit “price gouging,” but what do they know?

Are the critics suggesting that the net present value of the beneficial use of Harry Reid’s land to the people of Las Vegas, the value of jobs, of convenient shopping, and time saved is anything less than tens of millions of dollars? And what of the incalculable benefits? With this land now available for development, Nevada residents can stay where they are in Las Vegas, working at good jobs and raising their families. California families, embattled with the high taxes and government regulations for which their state is famous, can move to Nevada. They can be confident that the brilliant manipulations of real-estate speculator Harry Reid will provide them with the homes and the urban infrastructure they need. What price for that?

The real question is whether Senator Reid’s activities come up to the mark for transparency and global best practice. Should United States Senators be allowed to trade in land when they are using their power and influence to increase the value of that land? Maybe they should. If so, then should United States Senators be obliged to post details of their land transactions on the Internet within 24 hours of any change or face a $100,000 fine and a year in jail? Should they even be obliged to publish their land transactions in advance?

The problem isn’t that United States Senators trade in land and use their power and influence to improve the value of the land they own. The problem is that that the American people are shut out of the process. And that is wrong.

This might not be a problem for Republican Senators. As University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone asserts in connection with the legal system, conservatives want to “protect property rights and the interests of corporations, commercial advertisers and the wealthy” like Senator Reid and his partners. So if a wealthy conservative senator grabs all the profits from a land development deal, no problem for conservatives.

But surely liberal Democratic senators cannot endure this sort of thing. As Stone says: “Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power.” And there is no area of government activity where exercise of government power is more particular than in the zoning of real estate.

Here is an idea. We should set up an on-line market in senatorial land deals. Every senator would be required to post his land holdings, whether direct or through an investment company or partnership. Ordinary Americans could then buy futures in the land in an online market similar to the Iowa Electronic Markets.

No, wait. Here is a better idea. All senatorial land holdings should be displayed in an online map application like Google Maps or the real-estate site Zillow, where you can look up the value of your neighbor’s house. And then just by clicking on the map ordinary Americans could access an online market in senatorial land futures.

Please do not think that Senator Reid, a Democratic senator sensitive to competing values, was swinging these land development deals just for the money. Oh no. He was undoubtedly engaged in delicate research to determine the particular ways in which government power is exercised in the zoning of land and the management of urban growth for his Nevada constituents. Now that his researches are complete we can expect that he will shortly introduce legislation in the Senate to curb abuses in commercial land development practices and will donate all his windfall profits to worthy Nevada charities.

It is a comforting thought.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Home

American Manifesto

Chapters

Chappies

roadtothemiddleclass

presented by Christopher Chantrill

Follow @chrischantrill • Contact