When the Walmart destroys the downtown, it breaks up the community with the people who used to live and work downtown have to find something else and it usually means somewhere else.  In todays society, too many people only have month-old acquaintances instead of life-long friends so may not understand.  Walmart has cheap stuff today, but then half your longtime friends disappear to remote places.

Community is a principle, and possible necessary to liberty.  We’ve had trouble having democracy without rule of law, but your complaint about “hamburgers” sounds like “why should I care about surveillance cameras - they don’t bother me” that complacent citizen units regurgitate.  Some people don’t value liberty, but it is a mistake to ignore people who value community.  The problem is not with the immediate effects, or the immediate good, but with the longer term corrosion.

There is a line between culture, society, and community that differs from the market and economy.  Are friends and family priceless or just a commodity?  Small town life or even the community of a neighborhood or a street in a big city is not something you can just pay for when you want it, no more than we can cut down all the Sequoias today but have full grown trees two years from now if we change our mind next year.

Yes, it is just hamburgers.  Either served by an anonymous cooking and conveyor system at some corner location you know through mass marketing, or by your friend Joe who calls you by name and jokes with you and knows how you are doing and you don’t have to bother saying “medium well with mayo”.

The SF Board of Stupidvisors is about as “paleocon” as Justin is “neocon”. Paleocon? So they’re friendly to the church, agreeable to gun rights, pro-life, and against the welfare state? Justin, have you been standing downwind in Haight-Ashbury on a weekend again?

Justin’s got a good brain, and some interesting commentary.
But nobody from San Francisco, the most liberal Democrat
city in the USA---after Washington DC that is---can
have a clue about what’s going on in the real world
where people actually work for a living, have families,
and are trying to raise a couple of kids, in a home of
their own, without suffering from the corresive effects
of the “free market”, that people in San Francisco
are sheltered from.

If Liberals are hypocrites who like everyone else to
bear the burden of THEIR sense of social justice, then
“libertarians” are moral hypocrites who like everyone
else to compete in a “free market” from which they are
protected.

A few months ago, all the libertarians were talking about
joining the Democrat Party...I’m waiting for them to
leave. Good riddance I say. Their continued insistance
on the fantasy of a “free” market, and the thunderous
ranting about “government is theft” isn’t doing anything
for anybody but the wealthy CEOs and trust fund babies
who benefit from our system of >snicker> “free” markets.