You should live in a country without a culture and legal framework for competitive markets, or try to talk to someone first hand who has such experience. I suspect you're a good person who just misunderstands how markets and individual rights interconnect.
If the local government can simply declare "there are enough X, no more are allowed" then the rich, powerful and well-connected elite can solidify their privileged positions forever. Raise prices, lower wages, provide poor service - it doesn't matter, their buddies on the city council will guarantee no one is allowed to open a competing business.
If you want to protect the lower class and middle class, you don't want to hand the elite a tool to turn their business into a local monopoly for the price of a campaign contribution.
Right, I get it, monopolies are bad and this is something I completely agree with. At the same time those well connected elite will commonly band together to create monopolies via predatory pricing, so it turns out that no matter what way you do it you have to have regulatory markets that seek to benefit the consumer.
The elite have all the tools they need already, they always have had that. Representative government is the modern change that keeps them from dominating everything.
I’m not a free market maximalist. I just don’t see how some random local politician is more qualified to determine how many car washes are permissible than local business owners who have bought and permitted car wash businesses.
And for whatever it’s worth there aren’t nearly enough car washes where I live.
A politician may be more or less qualified than the business owner, but they don't have the obvious conflict of interest and are more likely to act in the interest of the locality as a whole
Isn't it? Elections are for political institutions, so what you're describing amounts to having political control over land use decisions. OTOH, the market is another, much more direct expression of the intent and values of the local people, so why not just stick with that?
> amounts to having political control over land use decisions
This exists in America, in ways that have generally escaped the label of "Communism". The most basic example of this most will be familiar with is zoning laws, but there is significant precedent otherwise. There will always be a gradient of control, and claiming that a singular government action in expansion is therefore communist is not intellectually honest.
s people object to zoning laws for exactly the same reason. Have Jacobs won renown for pointing out exactly how zoning laws undermined the emergent nature of cities, and destroyed value for their residents. Whatever label you call it by, the critique is the same: central planning is far worse than organic emergence.
"Local people electing a local government choosing what gets built locally is communism"