God Save Austin
I find this really puzzling, as Americans, we seem to have this strange implicit assumption that the market should protect and reinforce culture. That is to say, that as demand increases for cultural artifacts, that the market should grow without affecting access to such artifacts.<p>It seems that when this assumption does not seem to play out, our reflex is to say that the markets are obviously failing and that policy should step in in order to preserve the integrity of the culture (i.e. we need to stop ruining our neighborhoods with all this development and letting all these _other_ people in!).<p>I feel like this is putting the cart before the horse. IMO (and I&#x27;d love to hear other people&#x27;s opinion about this) cultures are emergent properties from markets. When people come together in order to trade goods and services, market forces will reward economies of scale to those who minimize costs associated with things like time to market, access to labor, etc. This increase in density with others leads to community development, which in turn leads to an exchange of collective values, shared cultural artifacts, etc.<p>From this perspective, the desire to limit market expansion is really an attempt to say which values are acceptable and places incumbents as cultural police for which values are allowed entrance. This seems entirely antithetical to the American ideal of being a nation of immigrants and&#x2F;or being a culture of acceptance and tolerance.