Annexation is bad for both wings

Matt Mittan is right when he says that it is a big mistake for progressive City Council members to be annexing conservative or even centrist neighborhoods before the City Council election, or for that matter at any time before any election. It is not worthwhile to sacrifice true progressive potential in a limited area, in order to risk diluting the progressive vote by expanding that area. Asheville will not be able to make the kind of headway that it needs to make if it keeps shooting its aspirations in the foot with centrist, dilution-causing annexation.

The mistake is really the same as that of the North in 1861. We never would have had a Nixonian Southern strategy or a Texan president if we had bid good riddance to Dixie and slavery instead of fighting a war that eventually empowered the opposition.

In the same vein, I am very interested in the Libertarian Free Town Project, and I hope that heavy municipal contraception can replace public-school spending in a selected Overpopulation Town. Provincetown, Mass., had only 8 percent children in the 2000 census, one-third of the national average, and if a town near Reno, Nev., has already legalized prostitution, then they would have trouble regarding municipal contraception as taboo. But again it is clear that getting ambitious about area destroys the realistic political potential, so don’t do it.

— Alan Ditmore
Leicester