CON GAMES: Commies Take On Capitalist Pigs In Aspen

May 7th, 2007 at 06:54am Michael Conniff 2

The basic divide between the candidates running for Mayor of Aspen is as obvious and invisible as the Berlin Wall: the difference between Communism and Capitalism.

Think I’m kidding? Consider that at least one low-to-no-growth candidate in the race has embraced the prospect of a massive, 83,000-square foot building on Galena Plaza that would encompass the burgeoning if baffling needs of Pitkin County. Never mind that something like 70 percent of county workers live downvalley. Rather than an arts and entertainment center, for example, we would be looking at government workers trudging to work in a concrete slab dedicated to bigger if not better government. One of the tenants in such a building would be the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office, meaning the department legendary for its insistence on “community policing”—and now on the ground floor of the Pitkin County Courthouse building—would be presumably housed on the upper floors that much further from the community it is supposed to safeguard.

Such a monstrosity is not considered “growth” under the definition manufactured by the Bath Party of Aspen, where pretzel logic is far more than a phrase coined by a rock band. The no-to-slow growthers can embrace a cinder block of an idea without blinking because they can argue it’s for the good of “the community.” In the same manner, they can justify a bailout of the Aspen Historical Society, the Isis movie theater boondoggle, and even the dysfunctional notion that a twisted entrance into Aspen is somehow better for “the community” as they define it. In the same manner, the endless moratoria have to be good—right?—because it means builders can do no further harm to this “community.”

Socialism is now part of our social structure in the United States, and government has to have a hand on the steering wheel to smooth out the bumps in the road. But Aspen is way beyond that, with a definite inclination to use social engineering to create a class who have come to believe that subsidized worker housing is the closest they will ever get to paradise. That kind of mentality forces Bath Party pols to pontificate about slowing down growth rather than building the local economy in a way that redounds to the benefit of the common man and woman.

And what of Capitalism? The profit motive, harnessed properly, is a far greater force for good than any career politician will ever understand—not the unfettered whims of oligopolists, but the canny calculations of entrepreneurs large and small. Enlightened Capitalism is what Aspen needs, not some boneheaded notion of “the people” that went down the tubes with Gorbachev.

Entry Filed under: Politics, Con Games, Aspen, Colorado, Pitkin County, Affordable Housing