In Liberty, Market, and State, Buchanan argues that, since individuals are the ultimate arbiters of "value," of what is important and meaningful to themselves, democracies work best when they allow as many people as possible the option of satisfying their preferences.
"A situation in which individual preferences are met...[is] superior to a situation in which preferences are overruled," writes Buchanan. "Consider [a] simple referendum example, one in which the preferences of a majority for alternative A are satisfied, while the preferences of a minority for alternative B are overruled. Clearly such a result is...inferior to one in which alternative A could be chosen for members of the majority and alternative B could be chosen for members of the minority." Consequently, Buchanan argues that to preserve not only liberty but equality, as many aspects of life as possible should be left outside a winner-take-all political process.
Anti-superstore activists would, no doubt, argue that mega-retailers are simply incompatible with the "common good," that they would fray the economic fiber of the community to the breaking point. Those claims, however, rest upon fiction (the "common good") and misinformation (local retailers can't compete). Following Buchanan's line of thought, the optimal outcome would be to let the superstores in, and then individual townspeople could patronize whatever businesses they chose. "In a way," says John Gann, the Illinois-based business consultant, "the anti-Wal-Mart people don't have anything to worry about. If they don't go to Wal-Mart, it won't stay open very long."
Another argument: Let us suppose that superstores make things easier and cheaper only because, as Claudia Wu, legal counsel for the National Trust, puts it, "The zoning we have nowadays makes it totally impossible to replicate the communities we want." If we had "better" zoning could we, as the activists claim, once again have the kind of compact, mixed-use communities that existed before the advent of "rational" planning?
The answer will not comfort sprawlbusters. While there's little doubt state and local planning and zoning laws hugely influence development, they are essentially negative devices that can prevent specific types of development, not engender them, says Bernard Siegan, professor at University of San Diego School of Law and author of the recently reissued 1972 classic Land Use Without Zoning. "It's possible to succeed with elaborate mixed-use schemes, but they're fraught with difficulties and they almost never hold up over the long term. If they work at all, the planners have been lucky, since it isn't the planners who decide what works. It's people out in the market."
The major difficulty for planners is, at rock bottom, one of information, says Siegan. What do--or will--people want at a given time, in a given place, for a given cost? This information is so widely dispersed throughout an economy that no individual or group can collate it all, especially under the constraints most planners face.
Planning, says Siegan, is inevitably a political process about making a town or city conform to somebody's particular idea of what it should be. But even when planners can push their plans through, it is virtually impossible either to gather all the necessary information to create a successful plan or to make people follow it. Private developers do a better job, notes Siegan, because they can focus more specifically on market (as opposed to political) factors--and even they fail often enough.
Among planners, says Siegan, "There's a sense of 'Stop the world. This is the way things should be.'" That's understandable, he says, but that kind of thinking leads to a stagnant society. Think of plasterers, he analogizes. When drywall came in, it wiped them out. So what are you going to do--not use drywall, even though it makes things cheaper and lets more people buy and rent houses?
The anti-superstore activists' zest for comprehensive land-use planning is ultimately an embrace of stasis, of maintaining things just-so. That sentiment, of course, isn't new to anti-superstore activists. Neither is the rhetoric used to express it. The contemporary anti-superstore movement is hugely reminiscent of an earlier tussle.
In the 1920s, chain stores were the pariah of the day, particularly the A&P grocery stores (at its height, A&P operated over 15,000 shops in the United States). Chains, because of larger economies of scale and increased efficiencies in distribution, tended to sell a wider variety of goods at cheaper prices, which cut into local merchants' profits. The chains were new, different, and very successful.
As chains began to dominate the commercial landscape, they, like the superstores of today, came under attack as destructive and evil. Louis D. Brandeis attacked them along "human scale" lines: "I have considered and do consider that the proposition that mere bigness cannot be an offense against society is false, because I believe that our society, which rests upon democracy, cannot endure under such conditions." A chain-baiting radio personality exhorted Americans, "Wake up! We can whip these chain stores....We can drive them out in thirty days if you people will stay out of their stores." A 1922 book, Meeting Chain Store Competition, offered this analysis: "Every retailer who has to meet chain store competition...needs no one to tell him what a chain store is. To him, it is a cut rate competitor managed from the outside by a soul-less corporation."
Chain baiting, although ultimately unsuccessful, had consequences. As Harvard Business School professor Richard S. Tedlow notes in his 1990 book, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (from which the previous examples are drawn), "In 1933, some 225 anti-chain bills were introduced in 42 state legislatures; 13 were passed. Chain taxes had been passed in 27 states by 1939, although not all were still in force that year." It also prompted longer-lasting federal antitrust legislation aimed at reducing the chains' advantages; the laws had the effect of raising prices to the average consumer. (The American Booksellers Association is currently using one of those laws, the Robinson-Patman Act, to sue several publishers for allegedly granting bookstore chains "discriminatory" discounts.)
Those laws ultimately had less effect on the chains than the rough and tumble of the marketplace. The history of A&P, as dominant an economic force as has ever existed in the United States, is instructive. Despite being the nation's second-largest non-industrial company in 1950, by the early '80s, "A&P occupied a position in the American business economy in no way comparable to its situation three decades earlier," writes Tedlow. Sears is another example of a leader who lost the way. Indeed, today Kmart is going through a prolonged financial crunch, and financial analysts are beginning to wonder if Wal-Mart's fortunes are reversing.
Or consider my wife's paternal great-grandfather. During the Depression in southeastern Ohio's sparsely populated Jackson County, he started selling vegetables from a pushcart. He beat out more established stands by selling cheaper and going to where people lived. After long hours, a lot of hard work, and a little bit of luck, he created a local supermarket chain and became the big kid on the block. No sooner had he reached the top of the heap, though, than Big Bear and Kroger blew into town. From the '40s through his death in the early '70s, he was locked in mortal combat with bigger competitors. The chains offered more goods at lower prices and, damnit to hell, they had what seemed like endless money for advertising and promotions.
He was, I'm told, a Christian man, but his last words are rumored to have been, "Get that effin' Big Bear if it's the last thing you do." It didn't work out that way at all. His family eventually got out of the supermarket business and into other things. It wasn't easy, it wasn't simple, but it had a certain finality to it. Along with the rest of the county, his descendants buy their groceries from Big Bear and Kroger now. It's hard to say who's worse off that way.
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