The conflict between liberty and democracy

In Woodland Park, a small community in Colorado, there was a debate on whether Wal-Mart should be allowed to build in the community. I think that the most current news states that Wal-Mart is indeed allowed to build. Now, let's put aside whatever our feelings on Wal-Mart may be. In fact, let's pretend it is a Target or Big Lots, or whatever - I don't want this to be a pro-Wal-Mart or anti-Wal-Mart post. The point is this: we see a conflict between liberty (Wal-Mart's, oops, I mean, Big Lots right to build wherever they please) and democracy (the right of the people of Woodland Park to shape their community however they wish).

This struggle between democracy and liberty happens in many other places as well. Consider speech that is indecent, like an adult video store. Should free speech be protected (the liberty side), or should the community be able to control standards of decency within the town (the democracy side)? I can see the merits of both.

Well, how do we resolve these issues? One thing that helps is the Constitution. Now, the Constitution primarily concerns state and federal governments. Should it even address local governments, or should local governments have more flexibility based on the will of the people?

Carl Milsted touches on these issues in the Free Liberal.

Consider a small city with 36,000 eligible voters. In a grueling 10 hour town meeting, each voter gets one second to speak on average. Obviously, we cannot allow equal speaking rights and still have meaningful debates.

If we are to have all governmental decisions (and many economic decisions as these Rolling Thunder activists advocated), we can expect many such grueling meetings. We can kiss our weekends goodbye. We can expect tempers to flare. Eventually, we can expect many absences, with government falling back into the hands of special interests.

These problems grow worse if we consider a large city.

[...]
Democracy does not scale up.

A better solution is to scale government down. If we are to have true democracy, then the term “local government” should be at a level much smaller than a city. For example, instead of having citywide zoning, each neighborhood could have its own zoning meetings. Let those who pay the price of having a busy store next door decide the zoning.

So, it seems that Milsted supports local governments having a say in the community, provided that these local governments stay small.

This also seems to fit well with the Constitution. Federal and state governments are limited in what they can do by the Constitution itself, but local governments have more flexibility.

I'm not advocating anything here. I still think local governments should be limited to some extent, because local governments can still do tyrannical things. But with smaller local governments, even if they pass oppressive laws, people have more flexibility in determining what type of community in which they want to live if these communities are smaller. And if a city passes a dumb law, it can affect hundreds of thousands of people, whereas smaller local governments affect fewer people. Should local communities be able to pass laws against certain types of speech? Should they be able to spend money on anything they please? I don't know. But in any case, Milsted and I would agree. Smaller is better.