Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
The planner’s delusion: The backward logic of Seattle’s ‘Amazon tax’
The planner’s delusion: The backward logic of Seattle’s ‘Amazon tax’
Apr 26, 2025 12:33 AM

As Americans continue to flock to large cities in search of opportunity and connection, many of those same cities are suffering from expensive housing costs, arbitrary price controls, onerous regulations, and cronyist governance—the sum of which is serving to diminishaccess to the pondand stunt opportunity among the disconnected.

In Seattle, Washington, for example, we see the typical cocktail of a progressive urbanist’s daydreams, mixing excessive land-use regulationswith a series of knee-jerk jolts in the minimum wage. Despite being home to some of the fastest panies, the city’s policies are beginning to take a toll on local businesses and workers. Meanwhile,homelessness is on the rise.

Far from recognizing the source of such woes, however, the City Council has sought a remedy in additional economic distortion, passing a “head tax” on the city’s highest grossing businesses, amounting to $275 a year per full-time employee (down from the originally proposed $500-per-head). For pany like Amazon, the tax will amount to an estimated $12.4 million per year.

The goal is simple: to make 585 or so businesses pay their “fair share” for the city’s housing dilemma by funding affordable housing and emergency services for the homeless. As Councilmember Mike O’Brien explained it, “We panies that are profitable and making billions of dollars every year to help with the folks that are being forced out of housing and ending up on the street.” Or consider the attitude of SEIU Healthcare 1199NW, a local union: “Seattle’s exploding homeless population is a symptom of our city’s extraordinary economic growth and astronomical home prices…The corporations who are profiting most — the top 3 percent — should rightfully pay a fair fee to address the problems they create.”

Whatever the needs of Seattle’s homeless population, this is a curious path indeed—blaming economic growthfor economic woes—which only goes to show the backwardness of the logic, the size of the blind spot, and the scale of the planner’s delusion.

Despite the professed aims of the city’s planning class, such policies will only serve diminish opportunity and affordability—further distorting prices and driving away producers, rather than correcting the actual follies that led to a shortage of affordable housing in the first place.

The ripple effects of taxing jobsaren’t just bad panies; they cut straight to Seattle’s workers, asmany are making it known.Further, as Richard Epstein observes, “Picking on one group of successful firms will likely reduce their presence or even drive them out of town, as with Amazon. And it will surely deter other successful firms ing in.” If you need evidence, just witness the recent migration from coastal centers to middle-metros in the Midwest.

Instead of driving a wedge between successful businesses and those in need, the City Council would do well to focus on the barriers to growth, rather than the engines behind it. If the activity at the bottom is healthy, one could easilyconclude the problem might be up top.

As Michael Hendrix argues in The Closing of the American City: A New Urban Agenda, a report from AEI’s Values and Capitalism project, the city’s with high economic growth and rising housing costs have plenty they could focus on without imposing more fees or tinkering with prices:

The extremely high cost of city living has an obvious cause and an obvious solution. The problem is one of simple economics: An increase in demand for a good will cause its price to rise until supply grows to meet it—unless it is constrained by some outside force. The outside force in this case is the bination of overly restrictive land- use regulation, byzantine permitting processes, and a rampant fear of development in one’s own backyard.

…Reformers must liberalize zoning restrictions—full stop. America should enjoy a less regulated, more market-oriented housing market. Fewer neighborhood types should be deemed illegal. Changes in supply should more readily keep up with changes in demand. In prosperous urban areas, freer markets will yield denser housing. They may not immediately lead to more economical housing, particularly in geographically constrained cities with globalized property markets, such as New York City. And we must keep in mind that a vibrant city hosts a broad array of housing types; the aim is not to pave paradise and put up a skyscraper. But the costs of inaction are higher than those of action. In Austin, rents stabilized after 10,000 new apartments were brought to market in 2014 and another 8,000 were added the year after. Building more units does in fact lower prices.

To spot such solutions, however, requires a full and accurate vision of where a city’s flourishing actually begins: not from top-down tinkering, but bottom-up creativity and exchange; not from planning, but from searching, and empowering the searchers, in turn.If cities like Seattle wish to cultivate a city with provision for all—not just the rich and connected—it should begin with fostering freedom and opportunity in the paths of connection, creativity, development, and investment.

That will require more than lessons in basic economics or a self-awareness of the risks of political power. It will demand a shift in basic attitude and moral perspective—one that focuses not on dismantling the powerful but on expanding opportunity for entrance.

Image: Ron Cogswell, Seattle, Washington (CC BY 2.0)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved