Houston’s Anarchic Zoning Laws Are an Affront to Sim City
8th September 2017
Recently Almighty God smote the city of Houston as punishment for its pathetic lack of zoning laws. I am an expert in zoning laws, having spent roughly 4,000 hours playing Sim City in high school instead of losing my virginity.
Going forward, Houston can either embrace zoning and place itself in the steady hands of technocrats who designate where bodegas, trailer parks and whatnot go, or it can stick with the present organic model, letting a bunch of mouth-breathing humans organize the city from the bottom up.
I know what Sim City would do.
Turn-based strategy games typically follow the Centrally Planned Economy of which the Soviets were so fond. That doesn’t really train you for real life, unless your ambition is to become a Faceless Bureaucrat in some future Democrat Oceania. But they are a lot of fun, and (among other things) demonstrate quite plainly that a centrally planned society will crash & burn nine times out of ten, and the tenth time is still pretty grim.
September 9th, 2017 at 09:36
Kind of like the game Monopoly shows that following a completely free market economy inevitably leads to all the money and all the property concentrating into one person’s hands. Which is why Monopoly games are usually abandoned in favor of something fun.
September 9th, 2017 at 11:09
The game of Monopoly was designed so that all the money and property eventually wind up in one person’s hands — hence the name — but it has nothing at all to do with a completely free market economy.