It must provide for all citizens’ basic needs and safety. In the Politics, Aristotle says, “the best way of life, for individuals separately as well as for cities collectively, the life of goodness duly equipped with such a store of requisites as makes it possible to share in the activities of goodness.” The philosopher outlines the things a good city needs to serve this end. It must be small enough that everyone knows each other’s character, at least by reputation. We are, therefore, in need of their restoration and of a reconsideration of our social and cultural aspirations as Americans. Traditional urban neighborhoods and small towns are better suited than suburbs to promote this end. But there is, nevertheless, a relationship between the places we build and how we flourish as human beings. This doesn’t mean that all people who live in suburbia are somehow morally deficient, or that those who live in cities are angels. Suburbia, after all, is right up there with baseball and apple pie in the list of things all-American.īut does it truly deserve that niche in the American pantheon? Suburban sprawl, characterized by enormous houses, big-box stores, massive parking lots, and high-traffic multi-lane roads, is in conflict with the traditional wisdom about the connection between the built environment and the moral order. There is broad popular assent to that position. ![]() Whether or not there is merit to Kurtz’s arguments about tax policy, his impassioned rhetoric presents the preservation of suburbia as a self-evident good, inseparable from the American Dream. Such policies, Kurtz argues, will result in a de facto abolition of suburbia, discouraging further sprawl and leading to metropolitan annexations. Written before President Obama’s re-election, Kurtz’s book-whose prose reads like Harold Hill’s pleas to the people of River City in The Music Man-warns that the president’s second term agenda will impose regional tax sharing policies to redistribute suburban tax revenue to city coffers. So begins Spreading the Wealth by Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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