Why We Can't Build Diddly Squat
I have a new article up at Discourse on “Why We Can’t Build Diddly Squat.” The “Diddly Squat” in the title of the article is not a mere figure of speech. It is the actual name of the farm featured in one of my new favorite TV shows, “Clarkson’s Farm.”
This article is partly a review of the show, which chronicles the real-life attempt by British TV host Jeremy Clarkson to run his own farm, which goes about as well as you would expect. But mostly it is an overview of what Clarkson’s adventure reveals about strangling government regulations, which make the difficult job of farming even tougher.
This dominates the show’s second season, which chronicles Clarkson’s battle to build a farm restaurant so he and his neighbors can make more money from the vegetables, grains, and meat they produce.
But the local planning council fights him every step of the way. A village nemesis hires a lawyer from London to denounce him. The council not only refuses permission for the restaurant but begins cracking down on his farm shop with an onslaught of pettifogging regulations. Their demands are often contradictory. The local police require him to install lights to deter burglary, while another bureaucracy denounces the lights as a blight on the local scenery. Highway officials complain that patrons of Clarkson’s farm shop are parking on the shoulders of the road, even as the council denies him permission to build a parking lot. Clarkson’s fame is clearly working against him, producing a resentment that hardens into reflexive opposition.
The whole story is a case study in classic NIMBYism: Well-off people in the local village decide that they want to keep the quaint farms of the surrounding countryside as their personal view, never mind the impact on the farmers. And these busybodies end up having more influence than the farmers whose lands they are disposing of.
I go on to describe how this is a microcosm of development and business planning in Britain (thanks to the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947) and also in the US.
I also tie this in to the other story about “Clarkson’s Farm”: the decision by Amazon Prime to drop the show after the famously abrasive Clarkson made some intemperate comments in a newspaper column.
So a different kind of village council cracked down—the village council of progressive Twitter and the Great Harry and Meghan Culture War. Since hyperbole must be answered with hyperbole, Clarkson was promptly denounced as a bigot and a misogynist, and Amazon announced that it would no longer carry Season 3 of “Clarkson’s Farm,” despite Season 2 being a huge hit. The narrow-minded conformism that used to be derided as the “village virus” of small towns has now found a home on social media, where it employs the same old technique of mass ostracism.
One last note: Speaking of narrow-minded small-town conformism, I just realized I should have ended my recent discussion of the moral panic over Michelangelo’s David in a Florida school by linking to one of my favorite articles, in which I addressed the role of nudity in art and argued that “We Accomplished More When Everybody Was Naked (in Art).”