From Building Codes to Noisy Chickens, Children, and Public Needs
Well, to start with, property doesn’t have rights and the public doesn’t have needs. So when students are asked to compare values in these two phrases, confusion often results. The current Stoa Lincoln-Douglas topic is:
2017 Resolved: The needs of the public ought to be valued above private property rights.
According to natural rights theorists, people have rights, with life, liberty, and property at the top of the list. So the resolution is asking for discussion and debate on possible conflicts between the rights individual people and families have to acquire, use, and transfer property and the desire or need of people in communities for security and social order.
Community or neighborhood examples could include a family’s right to own a home and paint it the color they want. That seems a reasonable rights claim, but when a family choose purple or pink, neighborhood discord will likely result. A family may believe their rights include a right to raise chickens or children on their own property, but roosters and boys tend to make lots of noise, disrupting neighborhood peace and quiet.
Leaf blowers and lawnmowers make a lot of noise too. Does the public desire for peace and quiet clash with a family’s right to make noise cutting grass and blowing leaves? A 2013 study finds 42% of Americans have had neighborhood disputes, with noise (48%), pets and animals (29%), and children (21%) the major sources:
Getting along with neighbors isn’t always easy. Forty-two percent of Americans say they have had a dispute with a neighbor, according to a new survey by FindLaw.com…
Beyond the challenges of noise in neighborhoods are challenges of building safe homes in the first place, with safe plumbing, clean water supplies, as well as electric power and natural gas. And somehow the noisy leaf blowers and lawnmowers need to be safely constructed.
How are all these decisions made about quality and safety of construction and manufacturing? For Lincoln-Douglas debaters with the property rights/public needs topic, it may seem that these goals and values clash. How can someone have the liberty and property rights to build a house yet also be constrained by various rules and regulations to only build safe houses?
First off, in all matters of business and society, we are surrounded by networks of rules and norms that guide and often restrict our behaviour and actions. We are only free to use our bodies and property in ways that don’t harm others and the governance that enforces these norms can be through voluntary associations or from various government agencies.
In his book Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life, (Oxford University Press, 2015), 
economist Edward Stringham:
presents case studies of the various forms of private enforcement, self-governance, or self-regulation among private groups or individuals that fill a void that government enforcement cannot. Through analytical narratives the book provides a close examination of the world’s first stock markets, key elements of which were unenforceable by law; the community of Celebration, Florida, and other private communities that show how public goods can be bundled with land and provided more effectively; and the millions of credit-card transactions that occur daily and are regulated by private governance. Private Governance ultimately argues that while potential problems of private governance, such as fraud, are pervasive, so are the solutions it presents, and that much of what is orderly in the economy can be attributed to private groups and individuals.
Building codes, for example, develop over time, and vary across cities, counties, states, and countries. Knowhow and rules for building houses seem reasonable, just as knowhow and rules are for making automobiles, airplanes, boats, computers, lawnmowers, and leaf blowers. However, every year new innovative materials and electronics enable new designs that can be safer, stronger, more efficient, and often less expensive. How do standards and codes developed in the past apply to new designs and materials developed by inventors and entrepreneurs?
Building codes tend to lock in past knowledge based on past building materials and procedures. Benefits follow from adhering to proven construction methods and materials. But building codes can slow adoption of new materials and new technologies for constructing buildings. New/old ideas like Tiny Houses run into building code problems that hvae little to do with safety. “Tiny house zoning regulations: What you need to know,” (Curbed, September 22, 2016) begins:
Despite the growing enthusiasm for tiny houses, it still isn’t easy to legally build them for full-time use. Zoning laws and building codes, by and large, require a minimum square footage for new-construction homes, and progress to reduce that square footage is slow.
The article explains the background for local building codes:
It’s important to understand the difference between building codes and zoning—both of which dictate and limit the construction of tiny homes. “Construction codes tell you how to build your house,” explains Andrew Morrison, of Tiny House Build. “Zoning depends on where you’ll build your house.”
Most of the country’s local building codes have been adopted from the International Residential Code (IRC) for one- and two-family dwellings, which contains size specifications like rooms (except bathrooms and kitchens) must be at least 70 square feet, while ceiling height must be at least 7 feet.
As with other policy topics, building codes are part of the larger private vs. public governance and regulations verses certification debate. Building codes raise prices and lock in antiquated rules, but provide baseline standards for buyers, banks, and insurance companies to rely on.
As a policy topic, debaters could dig into the history and policy debates. NPR had segment on a group pushing for approval of “tiny house” building code revisions. Current codes block tiny houses in most counties and cities and mostly not for safety reasons. Further, building codes matter less than enforcement of building codes. Who is enforcing building codes and making sure buildings stay up to code over time? Economists argue the key is in incentives. In market system, it is insurance companies that would have to cover the cost of collapsed buildings and other damage that have the key incentives, along with builders and their stockholders.
Private firms provide building inspection services, often working for local governments.
One of the least publicized services that municipal governments hire private companies to perform is mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and building code inspections. In Michigan, regions as diverse as Clinton County and the city of Rockford contract with private inspectors to enforce code regulations.
There are at least seven private, for-profit firms in Michigan that cater to this niche market. Several also conduct city planning and zoning reviews under contract and can issue citations to code violators. “Looking Over Private Inspections” (Michigan Privatization Report, December 1, 2000)
One of the least publicized services that municipal governments hire private companies to perform is mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and building code inspections. In Michigan, regions as diverse as Clinton County and the city of Rockford contract with private inspectors to enforce code regulations.
There are at least seven private, for-profit firms in Michigan that cater to this niche market. Several also conduct city planning and zoning reviews under contract and can issue citations to code violators.
Also, an example from Ft. Worth:
By contrast, when builders use private inspectors, they save huge amounts of precious time. The city of Fort Worth, Texas, learned this when it began supplementing its municipal inspectors with private ones in March 1999. One Fort Worth contractor, Ron Formby, reported that privatization caused a dramatic drop in the inspection time required for building plan reviews for 80 to 100 homes. Before privatization the reviews took from 30 to 40 days. After privatization, they took only three to four days.
There is nothing about private, for-profit inspections that would make them of less quality than public ones. Private inspectors simply cannot afford to do shoddy work because it would hurt their profits. Government inspectors, on the other hand, have no such obvious incentive.
More on “Building Code Blues” in this Freeman article.
For safety with equipment like electric lawn mowers and leaf blowers, a private firm, Underwriters Laboratories, provides the standards, testing, and certification. Few if any stores would offer electrical products that aren’t UL approved. Here is page for the UL Standard for Electric Lawn Mowers. The Outdoor Power Equipment Institute lists standards for gas-powered lawn mowers here.
Similar story with food safety. Grocery stores and other private firms in the food supply system don’t rely on FDA or USDA because both agencies tend to use older technologies and testing procedures. Instead, a private-sector network of food testing organizations and risk-management firms (insurance firms) monitor, test, and deploy latest science and technology to insure food safety. Grocery stores, restaurants, and food companies will lose business and likely be sued if their customers are sickened by unsafe food, regardless of whether FDA or USDA signed off on quality and processing facilities.
Various posts on food safety certification and regulation here (for Stoa food safety policy topic).
Private certification and governance plays a significant role in a wide range of social order, standards, and safety issues, and economists like Edward Stringham offer examples from history and around the world today suggesting that societies flourish with far less government (much as private and homeschooling flourish without state and federal government subsidies and regulation).
Critics argue that too many social decisions are made by private governance and therefore outside democratic processes. Public Policymaking by Private Organizations: Challenges to Democratic Governance (Brookings Institution Press, July 12, 2016). A chapter (pdf), “Public Policymaking by Private Organizations,” explains:
Among many other public functions, these [private] organizations certify professionals and tradespeople as competent, establish industry regulations, and set technical and professional standards that give them broad reach into people’s lives and have an enormous impact on society. But because their operations lack the transparency and accountability required of governmental bodies, these groups constitute a policymaking territory that is largely unseen, unreported outside of trade publications, uncharted, and not easily reconciled with democratic principles.
The authors of Public Policymaking by Private Organizations offer five sources of governance rules: legislation, administrative agencies, the judiciary, hybrid government/private organization, and the fifth, fully private governance:
…private groups also make and enforce rules that function like governments’ laws and regulations.
Distinguishing five arenas of policymaking in the United States can help explain why private governance institutions must be included in any map of the American public policy universe. Three of these arenas— legislatures, which enact laws; the executive branch with its administrative agencies, which make and enforce rules to implement the laws; and the judiciary, which enforces and also makes policy through its decisions— are generally well understood. Unfortunately, in much of the political science and policy literature, they are depicted as the entire policy world. They are covered thoroughly in academic literature and discussed widely among the interested or attentive public.
A fourth arena is not as well understood by the public and receives much less academic attention than the first three. This fourth arena consists of hybrid agencies that are created by government but operate with varying degrees of in de pen dence from government and its resources and often take on orga nizational forms unlike those of regular government agencies.