Deregulator: Alive since '85!

Raise the drawbridge Lousy thing about living in Vegas: We're a four-hour drive from the closest ocean. Great thing about living in Vegas: We can afford a comfortable, new home in a great neighborhood for about 20 percent less than the slightly delapidated, 30-year-old condo we owned in Culver City, CA. This came to mind when I saw this AP story about a bill moving forward in the California legislature that would impose Portland-style growth controls statewide. (What my pal Steve Hayward calls "suburban renewal.") And you thought housing prices and traffic were bad there now. This Reason article from Randal O'Toole spells out how disastrous Portland's "urban growth boundaries" have been, particularly for low-income residents. Guess our California friends who have been contemplating an exodus from Lotusland may soon have another reason to pack their bags. The growth-control crowd has a good deal of clout here in Nevada, even though 87 percent of the sta...

NRO on Santorum The story had died down a bit in blogdom, and then Stanley Kurtz revives the issue on National Review Online, taking on libertarian objections to Santorum's commentary head-on. As The Volokh Conspiracy 's Jacob Levy points out, the Kurtz posting is lucidly argued ... but wrong. And then there's this, from Kurtz: The libertarian asks, Just because two married gay men live next door, is that going to make me leave my wife? In a way, the answer is "Yes." For one thing, as a new generation grows up exposed to gay couples who openly define their marriages in non-monogamous terms, the concept of marriage itself will gradually change. No doubt, movies and television in a post-gay-marriage world will be filled with stories of the "cutting edge" understandings of open marriage being pioneered by the new gay couples, even if the actual number of such married gay couples is relatively small. That's a pretty lame defense of the strength or resil...