Sprawl Me

Everyone hates urban sprawl, right? Nope. Link. At least a few neo-cons think it's a good sign that we're losing agricultural land faster than a marine recruit loses his hair. Even though I disagree with the piece, the writer raises good points. Excerpt:

Sprawl is messy, chaotic, and sometimes annoying. In short, it is everything one expects from a free and democratic society. Leave the neat and clean societies for totalitarian regimes. Sprawl creates problems, just like every other social trend; but to damn it for its problems is akin to outlawing the sun for causing skin cancer.

Robert Bruegmann reminds us that much of the anti-sprawl crusade is a result of a rising level of prosperity, and the complexity of millions of individual decisions made on a daily basis by millions of citizens. Better to have to deal with long commutes and strained infrastructure than malaria, cholera, or declining life expectancy.