Disco Bay (1992) – Bruce Ramsey

I lived instead in a place like this

I wrote the next piece, which I titled, “Why I Don’t Live in Disco Bay,” while living in Hong Kong. (Disco Bay refers to the Discovery Bay development on Lantau Island.) Here I take issue with the libertarian idea that because private property is necessary for a free society, maximum freedom comes when all property is privately owned. When I wrote this, I was under Asiaweek’s thumb not to freelance, so I wrote it under the pseudonym R.K. Lamb. (“Lam” is my surname in Chinese.) It appeared in the May 1992 issue of Liberty.

Years ago, I used to live in a mobile-home park in Everett, Washington. It was a “proprietary community,’’ an example of the theory advocated by many libertarians. A private developer had built it. He owned the land, and he set the rules.

Even the streets were private. But the speed limit was 10 m.p.h. — too slow, I thought. As a mere tenant, I had no vote in the matter. The owner also banned children. If a couple had a baby, they had to move out within one year.

As a practical matter, moving out usually meant selling the home. When I decided to sell, I found that there was only one sales agent: the park manager. Legally he couldn’t enforce his monopoly, though he would have if the law allowed it. In practice he insisted on a 7 percent commission, and got it.

He also objected to my plants. The entrance to my front door was a tunnel under a broadleaf lilac tree and a vine maple. “These’ll have to go,’’ he said distastefully. He was ready to come around with his backhoe and rip the trees out himself, and bill me a hundred bucks. I had nothing to say about it. He owned the land, and could have ordered me to dig up the trees any time.

The manager’s place had no trees — just a flat lawn and three trimmed camellias shoved up against his sheet-metal siding. Well, he was the manager, and he set the esthetic standards in his park. Plastic ducks and ceramic leprechauns were OK, but not vine maples. Too disorderly.

It was a relief to get back to the public streets. Nobody told me what to plant or dig up. For a couple of lazy years, I harvested the back lawn with a Weed Eater once a summer, when the grass dried out and got to be a fire hazard. In the mobile-home park they would’ve sent a boy to do it and billed me at the end of the month.

In the city where I live now they don’t have mobile-home parks, but across the harbor is a proprietary community called Disco Bay, reachable only by motor launch. In Disco Bay, the only vehicles you’re allowed to have are golf carts. The development company has a monopoly on the sale of these carts, and behaves just the way theaters do when they set the prices on popcorn. The developer also has a monopoly on the ferry service. Every time it raises fares the newspapers in town are full of complaints. Residents have staged demonstrations — though at Disco Bay itself, I believe, they have no legal right to do so. It’s all private property.

Libertarians are all in favor of private property, and a (near?) absolute right of the owner to set the rules. They are also in favor of such things as freedom of speech, of assembly, demonstrations and picketing. But in a private-property world, in what place are these to be exercised? Where do you see them now: on public streets? or in proprietary shopping malls?

Employers are also proprietary communities. Libertarians can be counted on to oppose mandatory urine tests of, say, state university professors. But if a privately owned lumber company orders drug tests of its sawmill workers, what then? It’s not a hypothetical case. Some companies now insist on testing for nicotine to cut down on their health-care costs. This is private sector — if you don’t like it, quit and work somewhere else. Completely libertarian.

You want all education to be private? So the private schools say: “Any student who comes here has to have his urine tested once a week.’’ As a parent, I might like that a lot.

The fellow from Stanford University, caterwauling in your July 1991 issue that he’d been fired, doesn’t seem to get this. He’d publicly proclaimed that illegal drugs (MDA) were swell, and he was recommending them to his students; he had taunted the federal drug czar personally; and in effect, he had dared the university to fire him. So they did.

What does this guy expect? By proprietary-community rules, Stanford can set any standard it wants. In a libertarian society it could insist on the right to search any lecturer’s backpack — or his toilet bowl — as a condition for employment. In a private-property world, Stanford is just another employer — and wouldn’t your employer fire you if you went around telling clients to eat illegal drugs? Mine would. In a private-property world, any employee who insists on “academic freedom” against the management can damn well find another university to work for — or start his own. Only the university — the property owner — has academic freedom.

Libertarians are quick to denounce public-sector officials, but if it’s a for-profit corporation squeezing them, they accept it. I know a guy who’s dead-set against government ID cards in his wallet, but spends more than 40 hours a week with a Boeing photo-ID pinned to his shirt. I know another who’d never tolerate the government forbidding him to write, but has promised a private employer not to write articles like this one.

So what do you want: A world where you can do mostly as you like? Or one in which today’s public property is carved up into islands of private property, and the landlords have an unlimited right to set the rules? You’ll get more rules, not fewer. The process won’t be democratic. I didn’t have any leverage against that mobile-park manager. My friend in Disco Bay is waiting months for his overpriced golf cart.

Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw replied to the editor that if I didn’t like the private owner’s rules, I should move. To get away from building codes in California, they had moved to Tonopah, Nevada.