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IPFS News Link • Property Rights

Free To Not Be Around You

• LewRockwell.com by The Z Man Blog

A great house in a bad neighborhood usually means bad schools and no one will choose that on purpose. Instead, families will pay extra for a not so nice house in a great neighborhood because that means good schools. You can fix up your house, but you cannot make the local school better if it is full of misbehaving knuckleheads or headed that way because of the neighborhood.

People instinctively understand a basic truth about education. That is the quality of product coming in dictates the quality of product coming out. Despite generations of lectures from our betters, we still know that the apple does not fall far from the tree. If the parents are low-IQ losers, the kids are most likely going to be low-IQ losers. The schools are not correcting this. In fact, it is the opposite, because the other old saying about apples is also true. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.

Everyone, including our hypothetical real estate agent, is too polite and too afraid to say what this means as a practical matter. For instance, I knew someone who lived in a mostly Jewish suburban neighborhood of starter homes. These were townhouses and ranchers. A black family moved in next door and they got along well with everyone. Then another black family moved in, but it was ghetto time, with parties into the late hours. Suddenly, the neighborhood sprouted "for sale" signs and the demographics changed within one summer.