The Free Market Won’t Solve the Problem of Airplanes vs. Housing in Madison – Tone Madison

Who will ultimately live on the flight path when centrists fall for the fantasy?

---

This piece is republished from Capitol Punishments, Christina Lieffring’s newsletter about the plethora of bad policies, bad recordings and bad actors in Wisconsin politics. You can read the occasional episode of Capitol Punishments here on Tone Madison, but paying subscribers to Christina’s newsletter can read them all, along with bonus content.

---

Look, it’s from this month Citizen Dave the worst column former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz ever wrote? Not by a long shot. But I think it’s worth going through, because it’s a classic example of how reactionary centrism, even when it’s generally right on the facts, becomes absolutely useless.

The column focuses on an extremely predictable problem: With the F-35 fighter jets flying out of Truax Field, the city wants to build 900 homes nearby, but officials at Dane County Regional Airport say the fighter jets are too noisy.

Now I have heard from a reliable source that compared to other Madison area politicians, Cieslewicz (who was not mayor at the time, just commenting) was “not a complete dweeb” about the F-35 fighter jets. He writes: “Although I was not a strong opponent of the F-35s, I did think that on balance we would have been better off without them.” You know what? I’ll take it.

Unfortunately, that’s where Cieslewicz’s efforts begin and end.

“I also didn’t think it mattered what I, or anyone else, thought,” he writes. “The Pentagon had reasons for wanting them here (which they wouldn’t make public) and they were going to put them in Madison no matter what anyone said. So it would always be a matter of controlling the noise, not avoiding it.”

We don’t elect Pentagon officials; we elect our mayors, city council members, county council members, congressional representatives, and senators. Their job is to advocate on our behalf and push unelected officials to pursue a course that does not harm their constituents. If the Pentagon wants to do something that directly harms your constituency, it’s your job as an elected representative to push them to change course. Like, for example, when a city has a housing shortage and the military wants to bring their very expensive, very loud planes to the airport that is not adjacent to the city, but there it is up to the elected officials to fight hard against it.

The hard truth is that if Truax Field were on the west side of Madison, those planes wouldn’t be here. But because it’s smack in the middle of Madison’s poorer, blacker, and browner neighborhoods, where more renters, mobile home parks, and lower-income homeowners live than in other parts of the city, our elected officials haven’t put up much of a fight. Even though we knew at the time that Dane County was growing and on the brink of (if not already in) a housing crisis.

Cieslewicz’s rationalizations for this clear government failure only get worse as the column progresses:

“(A)According to an ongoing noise study, only a small portion of the development area is subject to noise levels considered unhealthy. And of course no one will be forced to live there and there should be full disclosure about the noise. Every buyer and renter should go into this with their ears wide open. We can expect that the market will work and the developer may have to lower prices so that rational consumers can weigh the noise against the price. Theoretically, this should result in more affordable housing.”

No one has to live in these apartments, but someone does. But that person won’t be Cieslewicz or anyone he knows. They’ll probably be poor and/or from out of town, so why should he worry about that? Furthermore, I am confident that landlords will disclose the potential impact on residents’ health – and not just on their hearing – because we all know that landlords are completely open and transparent about the health risks their properties pose to potential tenants. The need to protect tenants’ rights in this situation might be lost on Dave:

I suppose we can get philosophical here. How much of a nanny state do you want? Do you want to say that there will be no housing here at all to protect consumers from themselves, or do you want to produce housing and let fully informed individuals weigh the costs and benefits? I myself have become more of a free market man and less fond of regulation. I’m not quite Milton Friedman, but I am more attuned to free market arguments than I used to be.

Ah yes, the nanny state. That’s what I call it when local governments actually advocate for the health, housing, and financial well-being of their constituents, instead of letting landlords and real estate agents rip off people looking for a place to live.

What reactionary centrists have not yet understood is that the “free market” is a fantasy. Everything about this concept – the definition, the history, the case studies, and its actual impact – is shaky at best and completely fictional at worst. The fantasy is based on the idea that consumers will determine the winners and losers of the market based on the quality of products and services: the best producers and service providers will win!

The reality is that it’s an excuse to get rid of regulation, and you know what they say about regulation? They are written in blood. That sounds dramatic, but the kind of regulations the industry is trying to eliminate are designed to prevent them from cutting corners and endangering customers and employees. They counterbalance the unprecedented power of wealth.

At least most of the time. Some regulations are advocated by the industry, usually to protect their market share from new entrants, or to protect their industry from local regulations (looks to the Wisconsin legislature).

In an unregulated market, it is the people with money who decide what you can and cannot buy. First, they set wages, which determine whether consumers can afford high-quality items made by highly paid workers, or something bought in a sweatshop and falling apart. Guess which free market capitalists prefer? If they pay you less money, you buy the cheap thing (which often has a better profit margin), fall apart and buy another one. All this also distorts people’s perception of the value of labor, both of others and of themselves. How much would we each earn if our wages kept pace with our productivity?

Ideally we wouldn’t need regulations, but greed has a way of forcing people to do antisocial, stupid and harmful things: dumping sludge into drinking water, releasing harmful gases into the air, adding things to food that no one in their right mind would do. want to eat, and squeeze every ounce of time, energy and health out of their employees for as little as possible. If companies had behaved like decent people and cared for everyone’s well-being, we wouldn’t have had to create laws and policies to force them to do so. If they can blame anyone for the regulations, it’s themselves.

Ultimately, unregulated markets do not create more prosperity for the entire country. In the lecture I linked to above by Jacob Soll about his book Free market: the history of an idea he reexamines the case studies typically put forward by free market evangelists to “prove” that free markets generate more wealth than markets with more state involvement. It turns out that this evidence was based on interpretations without historical context or real economic analysis.

But you don’t have to go back to the Enlightenment for proof; Post-World War II companies operated under the rules of the New Deal and in an era of strong unions. “But the 70s!” you say. Well, maybe you shouldn’t have a society dependent on one resource (oil) controlled by an international cartel. But no, instead we decided to punish workers for being too well off, let the rich keep more of their money, and move jobs abroad. And look where we are now.

So we know that the right likes deregulation because it means people with money can hoard more money. But why is the “free market,” with all its shortcomings, so attractive to centrists? I think partly because it allows them to wash their hands of these thorny issues. They don’t have to interfere; the free market will take care of that. They can tell themselves that they are the good ones because they advocated for affordable housing. And they don’t have to think about the consequences for the people who live there.