Why American cities are weirdly shaped
economist.com
economist.com
In the UK a city boundary doesn't really mean anything. There might be a nice 'Welcome to X' sign but nothing really changes as it would in the US. I'm not even sure there is a legal boundary for cities here? There is for parliamentary constituencies and for local government areas, but not for cities unless they happen to overlap, that I know of.
So city boundaries in the UK don't really matter so aren't rigid, where in the US they are important and so rigid and so carefully designed.
For example, Connecticut divides itself into eight large counties and those counties are further divided into towns. Thus the meaning of "town" in Connecticut means a geographic subdivision and may have nothing or little to do with there actually being a cluster of buildings or even any interesting population at all. In fact, in Connecticut, a city is located within a town and is subordinate to it! Towns may set their own general method of local governance but are subordinate to their counties and then to their state.
Louisiana is divided into Parishes that mapped to the Catholic Parishes present in the 19th century instead of counties and are generally run by a governmental body called a Police-Jury which is a combined legislative/executive body with enormous local powers.
Virginia is divided into counties, which may have towns and other kinds of human settlements. But cities are independent of their surrounding county and act at a parallel level to counties in terms of political power. The county seat where the county government resides may or may not be in a city, but if it is there will be a parallel and equally powerful city government in the same area. Cities in Virginia, as defined governmental territories have very controlled borders, but may have very small populations. But in other areas, the cities are so large they no longer exist within a county at all and the historic county no longer exists. This has impacts mostly for taxes, schooling and property. But practically the most you would notice is that you could eat at a restaurant on one side of a street and cross to the other to get some coffee and pay a different sales tax on either side.
It goes on from there. From a practical standpoint, it almost entirely affects the locals and can be a deciding factor with where people choose to live. For outsiders, it doesn't matter much except that your sales tax might be highly variable as you transit through local governing zones.
I mean, from the air, from a car passing through, etc, the US appears very uniform, more uniform than most of Europe or other parts of the world and a lot of people here take that uniformity as a uniform administration. Moreover, there is a bit more uniformity than the ridiculous administrative rules indicates - zones, policing, codes and so-forth are unified by private entities and generally enacted to achieve the appearance of a uniform country.
Note: Also, the multitude of administrative apparatuses here aren't equivalent of, say, two or twenty fused nations threatening to break apart. The US unified this way and the over mess is much of a way for local to hoard their power, rip-off outsiders, etc.
Connecticut doesn't actually have county government. Counties are just a way of roughly collecting towns together.
That may have been true in the 18th and 19th century, but since the early 1900s, I don't think it's accurate to say that anymore. Nearly every state power has been checked by the federal court system at some point during the 20th century [0].
I didn't know about the Police-Jury system, but it's surely the exception. Wouldn't you agree that state and local governments mostly act within the bounds defined by the federal government?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
I agree that the Federal government trumps the State government, but I'm not sure that I envision it as "bounds defined by" and more as whenever the random walk of the Federal government intersects with a more local one, the Fed wins. There are plenty of areas that the Federal government can't be bothered to get involved and the more local governments fill in those niches. For example, the Federal government really doesn't care much about local zoning laws or building offsets from city streets and such.
But I can also definitely see how it could be viewed as you describe in many cases as well.
One thing that I do think is interesting is how poorly EU citizens understand the history (and mistakes!) made in systems like the U.S. to learn and model the future of the EU from.
Even that isn't always true. In many notable cases (marijuana, gay marriage, segregation) states openly defied the federal government and the federal government let things stand because it would cost too much to intervene to get the states to obey the federal government.
What often gets lost in political debate is that there is Federal law enforcement and then there is State law enforcement. For the purposes of the US Constitution, local law enforcement is State law enforcement, even if a given State might draw a distinction themselves. It is helpful to remember that the US Constitution is architected to recognize three types of entities: US Government, States, and foreign governments. Off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you if it groups tribal governments into foreign governments or distinguishes them from those categories, but for the purposes of this conversation they’re closer to States than to foreign governments.
So whether you have counties, boroughs, townships, incorporated cities, school districts, water boards, parishes, independent cities, consolidated cities and counties, villages, capital territories or completely unorganized territory; none of this matters looking from the top down because those are all part of the “States”, and Federal law doesn’t really have to care about those details. As long as there is some kind of work organization there, the Feds can work with them, make agreements and negotiate with whoever has jurisdiction over whatever in whichever State.
What this also means is that States and/or their (for the purposes Federal convenience) subordinate entities can make laws and enforce them according to their own constitutions, laws and general policies, and the Federal government has its own parallel set of laws, courts, law enforcement officers, prisons and policies. Parallel, not higher. Your local police department is paid out of your local government’s budget, not out of the Federal budget.
So let’s take one of your example’s up there: marijuana. As far as the State of California or Washington is concerned, weed is fine. They aren’t going to spend money raiding pot farms, they’re going to tax them. According to their laws, it is generally legal for medicinal and recreational use, so you will not be arrested by a State law enforcement officer, dragged off to a State court and stuffed into a State prison for possession, use, sale or purchase provided proper procedures are observed.
The Feds though? They might still do all of that in this completely parallel legal system over here though. They can’t change* California or Washington law, but residents in these States are still subject to Federal law.
Well what about marriage? Well while Congress has the power to regulate substances offered for sale in this country, commerce clause and all that, the Constitution doesn’t say anything about giving Congress or the President license to determine what is and isn’t a lawful marriage in any of the States. According to the 10th amendment, this is clearly reserved for the States since it is a civil issue not specifically reserved for Congress. So unless you can twist the commerce clause to somehow cover marriage, then Congress doesn’t really have a say. No, this didn’t stop all 535 of them from sharing their opinions the very second Gavin Newsom issued that first same-sex marriage certificate, but that was about the extent of what they could do. All of the real debate was largely contained to internal State politics and about the most a Congressional candidate could give was their opinion.
What about the Defense of Marriage Act? Here’s where it got only slightly tricky, at least until it was determined to be unconstitutional anyway. Actually that’s pretty much the end of it: it was determined to be unconstitutional. While the States determine who can be married, Congress has given the Federal government the power to offer certain benefits including tax benefits to married couples, which is fine, and DOMA essentially barred same-sex married couples from receiving these benefits, and granted States license to ignore same-sex marriage certificates issued by other States which they would otherwise be obliged to recognize under some other clause of the Constitution.
Then SCOTUS struck down Section 3, later Section 5 and rendered Section 2 a casualty in the process. Basically the system worked as designed, even though it was law for close to twenty years.
It is fair to say, that when Federal law and State law are in conflict, Federal law does trump State law in most cases. What gets missed is that the Federal government must enforce Federal law. It can get States to help, by coercion or agreement, but sometimes that doesn’t work. That’s why Sanctuary City/State laws can also exist: the States are charged with enforcing their own laws without any expectation of assistance from the FBI or ICE, and it goes both ways: FBI and ICE have to be able to enforce immigration and other Federal laws, with or without assistance from any State they are operating within because something like immigration is explicitly under the jurisdiction of the Congress and Federal government. Sometimes there is a societal conflict, or values conflict, but unless there is a legal conflict, none of that actually matters to the Constitution and by extension, SCOTUS.
tl;dr: States/local govs employ their own law enforcement and enforce State/local laws. The Feds employ their own Federal law enforcement to employ Federal law. Neither actually works for the other, but rather in parallel and it is largely up to their discretion when and if to cooperate.
* The Feds sometimes make grants for very specific agreements, generally if they want a special kind if cooperation they have to pay for it, but otherwise your police compensation packages come out of your local budget.
Like you pointed out, what enables the "defiance" of state governments in the face of the federal government is the fact that, in some cases, the federal government has decided that it's not worth causing further political unrest to quash this defiance. This is why we don't see raids on marijuana retailers in Washington and Colorado. In other cases, that political will does exist, as we saw when Lyndon Johnson called out the National Guard to force the integration of schools in the Jim Crow South.
There is also the very strong belief in, and the common acceptance of, American identity as being the more defining identity, whereas not so much in the EU.
While true, it is important to remember that this is a 19th/20th century type thing. Germany became unified around cultural/ethnic lines in 1871 (in France! so much of world war one was about the fallout from the wars of german unification, just like so much of the wars of german unification were fallout from the Napoleonic wars.) Italy became unified around cultural/ethnic lines in like 1860.
Before this, the individual "german" states were not politically unified in any sort of way; they all belonged to whatever multi-ethnic empire invaded them last, and they were more likely to war with oneanother than, say, with France.
My point here is that ethnic nationalism looks like the old-world default today, but this is a fairly recent thing.
I've even heard of state border checks in the southwest (mostly "papers please" immigrant checks...). Still not nearly as tight-knit as one would think.
It New England, where counties don't really have much power and the towns have the power that counties generally have in other States.
Or Connecticut, where counties only exist because there are federal forms you cannot complete without listing a county.
I am sure there are other exceptions too, but these are the places I have lived, and thus know.
This does not really makes any sense. Scotland has a parliament, in Italy some regions have special local powers, and I believe many other countries have various kinds of exceptions.
Administratively, the City of London and everything else in London it's totally separate. The City has The Lord Mayor of London, the rest has Sadiq Khan. Most of London has boroughs and councilors. The City has a bizarre system where so-called Aldermen are elected by guilds from businesses local to the area, along with an amount of councillors representing the local population.
Councils do have the ability to set policy for how certain laws are enforced and have some powers to create bye-laws although I'm struggling to remember the specific pieces of legislation which are relevant to this at the moment.
It's a less extreme version of what happens in Rome with the Vatican, which is a completely different country.
But in either case, it's just one inclave. The article talks about jigsaws happening in almost every city.
And there's no history of segregation.
Go back earlier and local government actually had ability to achieve things. Things that suited the locality.
Now everyone from county and town councils can vote against x (eg fracking) and Whitehall happily steamroller over it. The north shall have the ugly stuff, the south east the infrastructure and spending.
The biggest thing that changes is the school district. City schools tend to be worse than suburban counterparts, and that completely drives a cities ability to retain young families, thus altering the demographic makeup and tax base of the city.
Some city schools are excellent, and business case for a private or a charter school is stronger in a city. There's also wider availability of various after-school programs.
There's the space concern for those who wouldn't mind a backyard and a pet or two, safety concern associated with letting the kids just play outside, transportation concern as far as effort required to drive them to school and various after-school programs.
This stops being the norm when desegregation occurs. Now that all races must be allowed to mix in schools, businesses and housing, whites flee to the suburbs, put up giant financial barriers in the form of zoning, and refuse to be annexed.
These days overt racial politics is now dogwhistled as concerns about crime or undesirables or culture. But that's a big heaping portion of why things are the way they are.
(This only really applies to suburbs within the same state of the main city; New Jersey, most of which is suburbs, would not face the same annexation pressure since the main cities their suburbs are part of (Philadelphia and New York) are not in their state and can't legally annex them.)
In terms of $/sq.ft. an urban residence in the US will almost universally be priced higher than a suburban one. There are a few exceptions to the rule (Atherton might be pricier than SF, Beverly Hills pricier than LA), but in general if you have a fixed price point in mind, suburbs will get you more space for your dollar.
Your comment is contradictory. On the one hand you say that crime, who is undesirable, and culture ate incidental and have nothing to do with race and then in this sentence you acknowledge that American history was largely determined by race, although you use very passive language as though that "shaking out" was some benign, incidental process instead of the cruel and brutal system it was.
But there is a difference between saying people are primarily motivated by race vs. primarily motivated by class but using race as a proxy vs. primarily motivated by class only. Given that these are distinct things, it's not helpful to insist on identifying everything as being secretly racist, not because it conveniently absolves anyone of responsibility but because it muddies the discussion and denies possible solutions.
http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/10/07/new-uw-report-pain...
Here's a list of top 50 cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... It does not include Baton Rouge, Chula Vista, Chandler, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Fort Wayne, etc.
You can sort of see why - without Chula Vista, Chandler, Stockton, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo or Raleigh this thesis https://www.crpe.org/examples/six becomes much more muted.
It also measures public schools exclusively, ignoring the fact that urban communities are predominant attractors of private and charter schools - their business model makes less sense in suburbs or rural environment.
My city, Nottingham, likes volunteering to trial things. So we were the first or one of the first cities to have average speed cameras years ago, we also introduced a workspace parking levy. The former has gone nationwide, but the latter hasn't been adopted anywhere else.
The planners in Nottingham also love traffic lights and are utterly shit at roundabouts. It's a frustrating city to drive in, but has great, regular, buses and now trams.
That's very different to other areas, like Colchester where I lived before had loads of roundabouts and tended to phase out traffic light junctions for roundabouts. But it used to have fairly rubbish buses to the nearby towns.
My local city is Chester, and I couldn't even tell you where the limit of Chester is now - I presume it's no longer the old Roman walls. When you cross that boundary wherever it is, nothing changes. It's still the same local government authority, still the same police force.
Some of the UK cities used to have their own police forces too ([2], [3]), it's just more efficient (and probably resolves some fun legal challenges around jurisdiction) not to do that any more (see sibling comment for the City of London/Met but London's strange anyway). Until 1975, Glasgow had its own police force [2] with the surrounding areas covered by other forces, and relatively recently [1] had a dispute about its administrative boundary (again, likely for the purposes of tax - it moved which council was responsible for a shopping centre).
1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/1973915.stm
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Glasgow_Police
Places where the City is a unitary local authority will sometimes have a noticeable boundary. For the city I live in, the on-pavement (sidewalk for US people) cyclepaths swap sides at the city boundary - inside the city the cyclepath part is furthest from the road, outside it’s closest to the road!
Serial predators like the Golden State Killer[0] have leveraged this to their advantage and avoided capture for decades using this ONE CRAZY HACK. (exploit the jurisdictional morass by just moving around a bit)
I’d be hard-pressed to think of a time it made a lick of difference to me, having lived in the U. S. my entire life. “Don’t carry a handgun to Chicago”, okay, file that one away. “If you’re black”, and I’m not, “don’t stop for gas in Martinsville, IN”. Though that one might not still be true, I’d still stay away from Elwood, my Afro-American friend.
Other than that, with the caveat of being a white male, I can’t say I’ve ever had need to pay attention.
I tend to carry one becuase it's a useful tool to have but have to be careful which one I take with me when going on a trip outisde town.
If you search you can easily find examples of people being arrested for doing something inside a city, which (presumably) have been legal if they'd done it just outside of the city.
https://www.jcolaw.com/discharging-a-weapon-within-city-limi...
And if you’re discharging a firearm, yeah, you better make for damned sure you’re allowed (what was my one example that wasn’t related to race?). Your linked example calls out towns I’ve lived near (lived in Gastonia), and the reason there’s a need for such lawyers is due to morons that think ownership of a firearm and a box of ammo is all they need to shoot in their suburban backyard. But that’s not city-specific, it’s a safe bet that if you’re within city limits anywhere in the U. S. you best assume discharging a firearm is illegal (it probably is) until proven otherwise.
That's an example of you having to care about which city you're in. You can't just rely on your knowledge of federal or state law there.
Not really. If you're worried first and foremost about common sense, then you don't need to worry about the law. Common sense would preclude discharging a firearm in any urban or suburban area, unless you are inside a commercial firing range. It doesn't matter which city you're in, because you shouldn't be doing that in any city no matter what that particular city's laws are. Even if through some oversight that city neglected to create any laws concerning discharging firearms, common sense should still prevent you from doing it.
If you're on some deep rural farm and want to know whether it's legal or not to set up a private firing range, then you definitely need to consult your local law; there may be unintuitive laws about the distance you need to be from other property, roads, etc. But as far as shooting guns anywhere near a city is concerned, common sense should be enough to keep you on the safe side of the law.
That’s my point - you need to know where the city limits are. In the UK I have no idea where the city limits are, and I suspect there possibly may not be any formal city limits at all.
1) marijuana enforcement can be a huge deal, getting let go vs going to prison
2) fireworks enforcement
3) zoning and permitting, is absolutely huge
4) taxes (sales, property, and even income)
5) "sanctuary cities" can have huge implications for illegal aliens
6) homeless policies
etc etc
Leading up to July 4, fireworks are not legal to sell in every city, so you can tell city boundaries by where the booths selling them are set up. Which city you're in is also important if you want to set them off legally.
Local laws and regulations also have much subtler effects that help shape which cities are desirable to live in, but those aren't going to be as obvious if you're just passing through.
Where I live in California, the sales tax is different between cities.
Supplemental sales taxes vary by county in almost all circumstances. Generally, people can't really be sure what city they are in (if any) when away from home.
Street address "city" has no legal meaning except for the convenience of the Post Office. A Saratoga address might actually be in Los Gatos, or vice-versa, or outside all city limits. The atomic unit us the parcel; the parcel distinguishes the city (if any).
There are islands of unincorporated land all over San Jose.
There are lots of cities in CA with supplemental sales tax; for a partial list, see [0] and note the table under “Cities with highest combined sales tax rates by county”, every listed entry that isn't “countywide” results from either a city or sub-county special district (or both) having a local supplemental sales tax, and the listing only includes the cities with the highest such taxes in each county.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_and_use_taxes_in_Calif...
Redwood City, which in November passed a 0.5% city sales tax
As you said though, it makes close to no difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_authorities_of_England
In the past cities had much more political power than towns, and were able to annex and do other things. My city looks sort of like a pork chop, as they annexed railyards at the city edge in the late 19th century for tax revenue.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_belt_(United_Kingdom)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_divisions_of_Mo...
Am I misreading this? How/why does a city of 76 have a police dept with 50 people?
The second season of True Detective is based in a fictionalized version of Vernon, with lots of footage shot in and around the area.
Wow! Trying to spread democracy in the world, when you have little dictators in your own backyard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_California#Elections_o...
I'm having trouble getting at the meat of your criticism.
Local government is still a government. Things like this and the Electoral College make US an archaic democracy. Maybe it's better to fix your own system, before trying to teach others?
The fact that you had a banana republic with a life-long dictator just 5 miles from downtown LA - speaks something.
No criticism, more like a surprise. I don't care about politics and even if I did, I'm from a country which is a strong US ally.
It's fun but not helpful to pretend other countries are ignorant of their own problems and have monolithic opinions (in which case, why vote?).
In the US, geometric subdivision is overlaid with Lockeian concepts of private property. There's no general substrate of alloidal, ecclesiastic and manorial subdivisions. Birmingham Alabama's shape was established in the industrial age. Birmingham England's in the feudal. Birmingham Alabama's shape reflects a history of land sales in the age of rail not royal charters from the Norman era.
The structure of city government is usually better defined and resistant to change, and would “win” over the annexed towns. Usually there’s a ward structure that benefits a certain type of political machinery. The backbone of suburban politics are usually powered by things like volunteer fire departments, schools or other orgs. Those types of organizations will fight hard because unionized city organizations have more people and seniority, etc.
No sane person would vote for annexation who isn’t part of a city.
https://art19.com/shows/the-impact/episodes/99ffb9d5-58d6-44...
> The incredible shrinking city
> For decades, Memphis grew by bringing its suburbs into the city limits. City officials thought this suburb-gobbling policy would be an economic boon-- that it would bring in tax revenue.
> Instead, the policy was an economic disaster, especially for the majority black neighborhoods in the city's core. In this episode, we’ll tell you about the consequences of Memphis’ sprawl, and the city’s plan to fix its past mistakes.
This article should not be treating it like such a panacea, because it certainly went poorly for Memphis
Even a place like NYC that did it’s annexing 100+ years ago feels the problems. When I was growing up in Queens, anyone we interfaced with in city government locally was a castoff banished to the provinces or a political idiot.
The consequences of that can be seen all over.
Best schools, safe, and has a high property tax.
10 miles south of us is Detroit. Where the Detroit voters re-elected Kawammi kilpatrick despite having constant public corruption.
Do I want those voters to impact my schools? Do those voters want to spend 9,000$/yr on property taxes?
Its far too simplistic to think that there is only redundancies at play.
Edit: Also, it looks like Kwame Kilpatrick hasn't stood for office in more than a decade.
Exactly what axe are you grinding, here?
These kid's parents work two or three jobs, so we give them subsidized after school programs. Their housholds are food insecure, so we give them breakfast and lunch so they can focus on schooling and not their empty stomachs.
So much of this spending is just to try and bring these students closer to parity in the moment, but despite all of that, they don't get any that before they enter school in kindergarten, so they're sort of perpetually behind. It has next to nothing to do with government waste, or throwing good money after bad despite what that terrible "Waiting for Superman" movie told all the white flight parents looking for validation.
They use Birmingham as an example. Many of the pieces of land that seem like they "should" be part of Birmingham were racist enclaves founded specifically to avoid desegregation. The land was restricted with whites-only restrictive covenants, and if they incorporated as a separate city, why, no one would force one city to bus their kids to an entirely separate school system run by an entirely separate city. Which meant that your schools, theoretically integrated, stayed fully whites-only (still are today). The Economist's bafflement at how this came to be is easily explained if you look at the history.
I also see a bunch of carve outs where specific land owners have removed themselves from the city to avoid taxes.
Throughout the last few decades there have been several amalgamations. Finally we have one "super city" called Auckland. Its boundaries extend way beyond the metro area so it's kind of inside out compared to other cities.
Now I live in Southern New Hampshire in the US. It feels a bit like Auckland long ago. Lots of little towns, each with their own local government and services. They share some things like the a 911 emergency call center and police and fire do "mutual aid" when something big happens in a neighboring town but it still seems like a lot of duplication. If there is no sign, you can usually tell when you've crossed a boundary because the road surface changes because they have different maintenance schedules.
For example, in Redwood City in Silicon Valley there is a small bubble of only a few streets that is not part of the city (or any city). However unlike most unincorporated areas, buildings there do get municipal water, police, and access to he schools. Why is this? Because that zone has an auto paint shop, and other businesses that would not be allowed under the city’s strict environmental and labor laws. But people still need a way to get those services.
But fundamentally, California is comprised of counties, not cities; “towns” are largely simply customary ways to refer to a place. Some counties have only unincorporated towns and a number of counties themselves have no charter but are rather just run by the default rules in the constitution.
High-density regions like LA county or Santa Clara county are more like the European model with county governments, incorporated cities, school, water, fire etc districts, but even they have many unincorporated areas...and why not?
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/How-States-Got-Their-Shapes/dp/006143...
Racial segregation, obviously, is the biggest reason and perhaps the source of all other reasons. City planners in the early 19th and 20th centuries had racial segregation as their overriding goal to the detriment of common sense or logic.
Disneyworld is a city owned by a corporation, next door is a democratically run city. The Disney corporation has a sort of democracy of sharholders too, which elects a board etc.
Businesses renting space in DisneyWorld are not much different than businesses setting up a taxable nexus in a city or state. In both cases, force is used by the “landlord” to extract rents/taxes and if you don’t like it, you can go somewhere else. It is a “free market” of cities and states.
The exception is states where you are not allowed to leave. That is indeed a major difference.
But overall, libertarians and anarchists often single out “THE STATE” or “THE GOVERNMENT” for special thrashing, when governments are simply management teams of organizations, and the difference is mostly of scale. If anything, a democratically run city is more benign than a city which is run top-down.
So it is not competition. When you purchase land, it doesn't really belong to you. It belongs to the government, as you still have to pay their fee, which can increase at any time without you having a choice.
It would be wonderful if it were possible to buy land, and that land actually belonged to you. This is unfortunately impossible, though, so it makes no sense to talk about competition. It is not a free market.
When Walt Disney World purchased land, it could actually administer an entire city there.
What you are talking about is called Sovereign Ownership (alloidal title). Like the Royal Family in England has a bunch of grounds where there is no higher landlord. Theoretically they can murder people there and the police can’t do anything about it. States on the other hand don’t own land in the way that you’re saying. There are overlapping jurisdictions and laws, and compacts, in practice. Many of the states were commonwealths (eg Virginia) of cities before they joined the union. The history of states is just people and organizations joining forces into larger legal organizations.
Instead, the group that is charging you rent is the one who owns the land. And this true even if they call that "rent" by a different name, such as "property taxes".
Using the examples you give, Walt Disney does not own that land, as a different entity could raise rent in them at any point in time.
> The history of states is just people and organizations joining forces into larger legal organizations.
It doesn't matter. If this super organization has the ability to charge rents on all of the group under it, then the super organization is the one who owns the land. The smaller organizations do not.
That idea is ridiculous. This is not compatible with libertarianism, and is a bad analogy.
This is because it is not even close to a free market.
A free market would be one where people actually can truly purchase land and compete. But that's not possible. At the end of the day the land is not owned by you, it is owned by the super owner.
That's all. It is not actually compatible with libertarianism or anarchism, because there was never any choice involved in this.
Nobody can truly decide to pick up and leave, and form their own competing government. You can call this good or bad, just please don't pretend like this is a market.
This is why governments do indeed deserve special thrathing, criticism, and to be specifically singled out, where as private groups do not.
I can go live in this building or that. I can go live in this city or that.
Can I buy an apartment in a building and own it 100% without the building having any say?
What if the building is a condo? I own the apartment, in a sense. I bought it. But I still have to abide by the rules of the building. Does this make apartment housing not a market?
You’d have to define the term “free market” before others can independently verify whether something is a “free market” or not.
It seems to me that if you rigorously defined your terms and entertained direct analogies between what privately administered jurisdictions and publicly administered ones, you’d find there isn’t anything uniquely special about a democratic city government vs disneyworld’s management.
No matter if this "rent" is called taxes or not.
The entity that has the ability to take away your land, or raise the rents at any time, is the group that actually owns that land.
Governments deserve special criticism because they make what I laid out to be impossible. Disney world is not the party to blame for why people can't own land. That blame goes to the government.
It is because of this idea, that it is impossible to ever truly own land, that governments do deserve special criticism.
So yes, that is what is special/different between a private group and governments. If I discovered an island, owned by no one, or bought an island, governments would still be able to raise the rent on me, but Disney world wouldn't be able to.
The group that has the ability to raise rents on you is the true owner of whatever land you are on. And it is only governments that have that power, ultimately.
A free market for this would be defined as when everyone has to ability to actually own land, without anyone else in the world being able to charge additional rent on it.
So you buy land, and you own it. And no one can decide to charge you more rent for this, would be the definition of a free market.
Governments do not have this property of being a free market because they can change their mind and charge you money for it later. Therefore they are the ones who own the land and it is not a free market.
A free market would be defined as when you owe zero rent to anyone in the world, no matter if the rent is called taxes or not, and you actually own the land.
If the article is about governmental districts, it's because Americans are predisposed to having lots of small localized governments.
Don't like what the guys 5 miles over are doing? Incorporate a township and run your own government.
Google the link (on Firefox and Chrome, prepend a question mark to the url to force a search), or open the link in incognito mode are the two most common ways around paywalls.
Either way, there's a lot in the article and it seems wise to read it before answering the question it poses with a single sentence.
Depends on my connection speed
Too bad.
Don't do paywalls like that please.
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- There are plenty of good reasons against using the typical ad platforms, and the increasing adoption of ad blockers shows that users don't like them
- Hosting your own ads is hard in the internet and doesn't seem very profitable
- Running the website as a marketing expense to increase sales of the paper version used to work, but now people just stay on the website
- Microdonation platforms like flattr fail to gain any traction
Unless you somehow find good journalists that work for free a model of allowing X article reads per month before requiring payment seems like the best model available.
What about Wikipedia?
I run my website in this fashion.
To be honest, I don't particularly like Wikipedia's huge banners with pleas to get the last few millions in donations. If every site did that users were as annoyed as they are by regular ads.
A donation model might be the best thing to do, we just have to find the best way to implement it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Was wikipedia really 3.5x more expensive to host in 2016 than 2010? Why? (Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 )
EDIT: serious question, because if it is, I can restrict content on my website.
This is like a front page advertisement.
Which kind of meal would you prefer?
1) Expensive, tasty and healthy.
2) Cheap and loaded with sugar (so you come back to get more) while ads flash all around your plate and on the tip of your fork.
Same goes with cars, cosmetics, education. For some reason paying more for those goods is universally accepted. Why wouldn't people want to pay to get high quality news? "No sir, just give me the lowest quality, most clickbait news you have. Yes, I strongly prefer that to paying $10 a month."
Personally, for now, I'm paying monthly to those news sources that respect my attention and provide an honest representation of reality.
More in details we have already accepted that our constructions (roads, bridges etc included) do not last forever even with proper maintenance but I still have to see plans about how to rebuild buildings and infrastructure when they'll reach their EOL...
Even without counting that we already seen that we can't predict the future enough to build today something that can remain good, comfortable and useful after 50/100+ years, for instance in "ancient" area (+50 years only) we do not foresee today's need for parking, in today are many now try to imaging a future with drone and perhaps flying cars and we have nearly no idea on how to design today something that can work also for that future scenario.
The only think we know is that if we have abundant resources, space included, we can evolve with difficulties, stress etc but we can, in dense area or without much resources is practically impossible. That's why many not-much-developed countries in eastern Europe have better broadband than far more developed one, that's why the USA struggle to build hi-speed rails etc.
Many say that "riviera model" does not work, while I still to see definitive proofs, but I do not see ANY real working alternatives. Developed Asia scenarios like SK/metropolitan Japan are essentially nightmare if you have to live in, not just visit as tourist.
That's why we read about people who die working too much, who close themselves in their room for months or years, they use big load of antidepressants, even more than the USA/UK (that are the top consumers of the western world) etc.
We develop any kind of things in response to our environment and we develop our society accordingly; that's why in cold countries we tend to have good welfare, reproduce less, are less violent than hot climate countries because cooperation is needed to survive, low density is needed because of low foods etc that's why in hot climate countries we tend to being far less cooperative, more violent and reproduce far more. That's also why in cold countries people tend to value space more than in hot one, that's why in some countries people dream an attic on top of a giant skyscraper in the city center and in others people dream a personal home immerse in the nature. And generally those countries evolve themselves accordingly.
Without speaking, of course, about pollution, traffic, noise etc. Perhaps for someone who have always live in a big town the level of service and public transport can appear really good, but if you ever live in riviera...
Of course MANY countries, highly developed included, have poor buildings quality and poor cleanliness in general, France where I live now is one of these for my Italian eyes, Sweden is worse than France etc but worse than London/Newbury/Carlisle (parts of UK a have visited a little bit more than a touristic trip) mean building I only see few Easter European buildings...
Oh, I do not like Paris or Berlin anything more eh! They are not a place to live IMO, however they have a less medium bad quality.
Or in older homes in the midlands and those were fine.
Paris has a higher population density than Tokyo, and that's with about half of the city's area taken by parkland.