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Comment by ucaetano | Hacker News Reader

> The American Conservative

> We want a federal government that restrains itself from intrusive forays into the lives and businesses

> Unfortunately, these well-intentioned dragons at the thresholds of the City of London have been unable to guard against the onslaught of hubristic architects and developers

Wow, that's hard to conciliate! A limited-government conservative who is also a NIMBY and in favor a strong-government urban planning.

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Perhaps Mr Thadani is merely expressing a personal opinion here.

> Dhiru A. Thadani is an architect

One may reasonably disapprove of something, even to the extent of quite literally saying out loud that it is a bad thing, and yet still think that government enforcement is unnecessary.

For example, Javascript.

There is no contradiction in wanting a small federal government and being in favor of local governments making rules to better the daily life of citizens, or accomplish any other goal. It’s well in line with the concept of subsidiarity, a hallmark of most strands of conservatism.

Not when you want this:

> authentically free markets

Heavily regulating land markets is as far away from a free market as you can be.

It's not quite the same, but Georgists consider land, in general, and not entirely without reason, as a special case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

American conservatives (as opposed to libertarians) aren't particularly for limited government, they are for government doing conservative things, and for limited US federal government, because the US federal government has been, from time-to-time, known to step in with great force to stop subordinate governments from doing things American conservatives quite liked.

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