Category: Local issues

Absurdite, Complexite, Precaucite: Part 3, More than the Hotel is Worth

14 June, 2013 (09:00) | Accessibility, democracy, Eminent domain, France, Government, Incentives, Local Government, Local issues, Precautionary Principle, Real estate taxes, Regulation, Subsidy, Takings, Tenth Amendment | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the preceding Part 1.]   By:David A. Smith   Yesterday’s Part 2 on the bureausclerosis choking France’s economy, using as source material a small-scale article in the Washington Post (April 16, 2013), zeroed in on the debilitating effects of excessive regulation from afar and identified some principles of regulatory balance [...]

Absurdite, Complexite, Precaucite: Part 2, That He Largely Ignores

13 June, 2013 (09:00) | Accessibility, democracy, Eminent domain, France, Government, Incentives, Local Government, Local issues, Precautionary Principle, Real estate taxes, Regulation, Subsidy, Takings, Tenth Amendment | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]   By:David A. Smith   Yesterday we saw, via an article in the Washington Post (April 16, 2013), that France’s centralized government (and behind it, the even-more-remote European Commission) so distrusts anyone it does business with that it has promulgated at least 400,000 norms and rules, all of them violating [...]

Absurdite, Complexite, Precaucite: Part 1, 400,000 Norms and Rules

12 June, 2013 (09:00) | Accessibility, democracy, Eminent domain, France, Government, Incentives, Local Government, Local issues, Precautionary Principle, Real estate taxes, Regulation, Subsidy, Takings, Tenth Amendment | No comments

 By:David A. Smith   When Yeats wrote Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, he could never envisioned the rise of the Bureaucratic State, which believes that lack of touch is no reason to loosen one’s grip on the capillaries – and so, unless the acquisitive tendency is checked, one reaches an end state such [...]

Where the sun don’t shine

3 June, 2013 (11:35) | Alleyways, Boston, Broken Windows theory, Chauncy Street, Cities, Enforcement, Health, Local issues, public spaces, Sanitation | No comments

By:David A. Smith   All of us have a body paSrt where the sun don’t shine, and while it’s intimately connected to our personal ecosystems, we have only the vaguest idea what goes on back there.   It’s got a mind of its own   Cities have such places too, one of them less than [...]

The ‘I don’t like you’ tax

6 March, 2013 (14:32) | Appraisals, Capital, China, Global news, Hong Kong, Local issues, ownership, Real estate taxes, rentals, Singapore, Speculation, Valuation |

By:David A. Smith   For the most full-on Monet of reasons (“from far away, it’s okay, but up close it’s a big old mess”), Signapore has imposed a hefty surtax on foreigners buying residential property in their thriving city state.  As reported in the Wall Street Journal (January 29, 2013):   Singapore’s Housing Tax Hits [...]