Meet the new neighbors: Why rules aren’t always such a bad thing

Have you met the new neighbors? They’re the ones who moved in next door with the 12-foot-tall rock concert speakers and the complete set of electric guitars and amps that make your bedroom windows rattle when they fire up each day at 5 a.m.

It wasn’t so bad when they were just papering the front of the house with old heavy metal posters, but things really turned odd when they set up the firing range in the side yard — where she does drunken target shooting with automatic weapons and he does nude interpretive dance with a parrot riding on his curly head. Cool, huh?

Isn’t this what paradise looks like for libertarians and anarchists? Don’t we want people to be able to do anything they want, just as long as they stay on their side of the property line? Well, yes and no. Let’s separate fact from hyperbole.

Most people assume that libertarians and anarchists want to live in a world with no rules. For some percentage of freedom lovers, that’s true. They don’t really care what anybody else does, just as long as they keep the weirdness on their own property. These folks don’t mind living in ugly, junky neighborhoods with people who have all sorts of weirdness going on in full view.

I’ve known quite a few people who claim to feel this way. I’m not one of them.

Many of us want something very different from the chaotic picture painted as “Libertopia.” (I’ve talked about this before — and again here.) Many of us want to live in neighborhoods that aren’t too different from some you’d find in affluent American suburbs. For me, the ideal of what I’m looking for is a small village south of Birmingham called Mount Laurel. That’s a street in the community just below.

For me, it improves the quality of my life to live in a nice neighborhood with decent people who know how to respect others. It might not matter to some people, but it gives me a kind of peace and happiness that I don’t get in a more chaotic neighborhood. I want restrictions on what people can do in my neighborhood. So how do I reconcile that with my desire to have the state leave me alone?

It’s simple. I don’t want a state imposing its willing, whether it’s through zoning or regulations, because I have no control over that. In our current system, I can buy a house in a neighborhood and assume I’ll be able to do whatever I want with it, but government can change its mind very easily about what’s going to be allowed — and my choice is taken away. In many cities, governments even have the power to approve or reject your architectural choices or even your choice of paint color, all without you ever having had a choice in the matter.

What I want is quite different. I want to live in a place where there are rules in place — that I have agreed to. If I agree to certain restrictions (and everybody in a certain area also agreed) before buying, I have no problem with those restrictions. In fact, they can increase the quality of life and the value of everyone’s property. And if the rules are voluntary, there’s no coercion. If I know when buying the house that certain stipulations come with the property, why should I complain when the rules I’ve agreed to are enforced?

Many people today — even libertarians — rail against homeowners associations because they can sometimes be ridiculous in the enforcement of rules. But when a person moves into a house that has certain conditions attached — such as no signs in the yard or no flagpoles — there’s no valid reason to later object to the rules when I decide I want to violate them. A husband and wife in Louisiana are suing their homeowners’ association because it demanded they remove this banner from their yard. It violates the neighborhood rules that they agreed to, but they think they should be able to ignore the rules because … well … just because.

I don’t want to live in chaos. I want to live in a well-ordered neighborhood with rules and requirements that we’ve all agreed to. I don’t want the nuts I described above — the new neighbors — to be able to move in next door and ruin my tranquil life. By the same token, I don’t want politicians and bureaucrats having the power to make decisions for either of us.

If you want to live in a chaotic neighborhood with no rules, you should have the right to join together with other landowners and create such a place. But I want to live in a Mount Laurel-type place, wherever it happens to be. Someone else might want to live in a place more like Brooklyn. Or San Francisco. Or wherever. We should all be free to choose the rules we live under.

Freedom means the right to choose our rules consciously. It doesn’t mean a complete lack of rules — unless that’s what we agreed to.