Nick Werner, of the Muncie Star Press, brings us the story of a civic-minded business owner in Delaware County. Apparently this business owner regards the requirement that he maintain his properties and keep them from becoming a blight on the community as “communism.” Obviously, I only have this story to go on, so maybe Mr. Hicks is being treated unfairly, but from this story it appears he regards civic duty as being a step away from Bolshevism.
The city’s Unsafe Building Hearing Authority on Tuesday leveled $10,000 in civil penalties against Arthur Hicks Jr. for failing to meet clean-up deadlines at the abandoned former American Lawnmower factory at 705 E. 18th St.
Hicks told the UBHA he did not have time to clean up the lawnmower factory because he is under a separate court order to clean up the former Car Doctors auto salvage yard at 1004 S. Burlington.
“It’s just like a damn communist country is what it’s getting to be like,” Hicks told the hearing authority.
He then told the hearing authority to kiss his “ass” and stormed out of the City Hall auditorium before the hearing authority actually took action against him.
The lawnmower factory was one of two Hicks-owned buildings on the UBHA agenda Tuesday.
I have not fully developed my thinking on this one, but this story struck me because yesterday I had been trying to identify what bothered me about protests that government is trampling on individual liberties. I certainly enjoy my individual liberties, so there has to be something else involved. I have tentatively decided it has to do with the feeling that for many, such protests aren’t so much for the freedom to pursue one’s self-interest with minimal government intrusion, but merely a plea to excuse mere selfishness with no regard for civic duty or one’s role in or impact upon the community. Mr. Hicks — as portrayed in this article anyway — was free to open and pursue his various business interests, and was apparently allowed to do so long enough to let his properties become run-down and a problem. His action or inaction with respect to his property has an impact on his neighbors and his community.
A person can and should rise and fall in life to a great deal based upon their own actions. But that is not the entire story. A lot of opportunities available to those here are not available to those in other places; Burkina Faso, say. And it doesn’t matter how hard they work or how clever they are. The opportunities, resources, and other conditions in their communities and countries simply are not the same. The protests of those complaining of overbearing government are frequently devoid of any acknowledgment of this fact, almost maintaining a fiction that these individuals act in isolation without standing on the shoulders of those who came before and in conjunction with those who stand next to them. We are in this together to a larger degree than some of these folks care to admit. That doesn’t mean we should squelch individual initiative in favor of some Borg-like collective. But our interconnectedness needs to be acknowledged. And civic duty is something that ought to be taken seriously.
First of all-could the harshest penalty have come from the fact that he told them to “kiss my grits?”
Second-I wish that more communities-like maybe Gary, fir instance-would become more “communist” like this. It is the owners’ responsibility to maintain any property-and the city/town responsibility to enforce such codes.
I agree with you Doug. Individual rights cannot come at the expense of the common good unless we are prepared to devolve into a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-like world ruled by warlords. I wonder what Mr. Hicks would think of the Dark Ages junkyard paradise he has started on two lots in Muncie if his adjoining neighbors and the rest of Delaware County pursued their individual property rights with the same alacrity.
If we lived in a magical libertarian paradise, this sort of governmental regulation wouldn’t be necessary because everyone whose property value (or aesthetics) were harmed by Mr. Hicks’s failure to keep up his property could obtain redress, directly from the source. But, unfortunately, in our mundane world where transaction costs tend to make any such remedy impossible to implement, we use zoning,laws, and other regulations to try, more or less, to get the same result.
There’s nothing communist about it; in fact, if you were lucky enough to spend time in parts of communist Europe when there was such a thing, you would find the weedy, junkyard aesthetic very well represented.
This story reminds me so much of my father cussing about 1950 when he was ‘forced by government’ to install indoor plumbing and fill in the outhouse hole..We were poor and we had to pay for it, and he did it himself,and that was most of the issue.Government has always been a problem and a solution.
If a person hasn’t traveled to a communist country,it probably seems similar.
When bringing words like “communism” and “socialism” out of storage for the first time in, say, eight years, it’s to be expected that some initial attempts to work them into conversation sound kind of awkward.
Sheesh guys, an awful lot of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing over some slobs’ misuse of a term isn’t it?