Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Sunday, December 18, 2011

"downtown didn’t exist before about 1820 and was rarely built without subsidies after 1930."

"Unfortunately, too many professional planners support pro-downtown plans because they have an obsolete view of cities."

Saving High Street » The Antiplanner
12-16-11

It’s not enough for planners to control where people live. Now they want to control where people shop. British planner Mary Portas has unveiled a 28-point plan for saving High Street (the Britishism for what Americans would call downtown). The most important part of the plan would prevent anyone from building a suburban shopping center without approval from the national government.

Instead of new suburban shops, Portas wants to require that everything fromsupermarkets to car boot sales (similar to what Americans would call flea markets) be located in town centres, er, centers.

Without these changes, warns Portas, High Street is dead. She estimates that High Street’s share of retail sales in Britain have fallen from about 50 percent to 40 percent and will continue to decline. Well, so what? People used to shop at little stores where everything was behind the counter and you had to ask the clerk for anything you wanted. Then came self service, then came longer business hours, then came park-and-shops, then came superstores, then came all sorts of other retail innovations. Many of those innovations don’t fit in High Streets where rents are high, streets are congested, and parking is limited. The latest retail innovation, on-line sales, isn’t location-dependent at all, much less does it require a downtown shop.

-read on at link-

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