Exit

Private cities and public places

Have you heard the old libertarian joke?  It goes like this.  Should heroin sales to minors be legal on public sidewalks?  The libertarian responds, why are there public sidewalks?  The libertarian answer captures a certain truth.  Conflict arises when spheres of action, the set of actions deemed by others as reasonable, are ill defined.  Private property denotes clear spheres of action, thereby minimizing conflict.  By resorting to private property instead of public property, questions of appropriateness of certain courses of action are taken out of the public sphere.  In essence, the joke says the sales of heroin (I will ignore the aspect of children) should be a private matter.

However, while I believe the public sphere is currently too big, I do not believe the optimal size of the public sphere is zero.  The following essay is my attempt to square my advocacy for private or proprietary cities, cities where a single entity owns the land on which the city is constructed and leases it to renters, with my belief in a public sphere.

First, one can distinguish between what might be termed an economic (or crude) defense of proprietary cities vs a holistic (or liberal) defense.  An economic defense would solely consider whether people vote with their feet.  If people choose to move to the proprietary city, it is better than their alternative options.  A holistic defense considers more than just people voting with their feet.  It questions whether proprietary cities can offer adequate protections for civil rights.  Will there be a healthy civil society, freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process for those accused of crimes.  In short, will a proprietary city be an extension of the modern liberal order, or a subversion of it.

As an economist I am very sympathetic to the economic arguments.  In fact, all other things being equal, more crude proprietary cities are better than fewer.  However, all other things are not equal.  Crude and liberal proprietary cities are, to some extent, substitutes.  This is especially true for the first proprietary cities, whose success (or failure) will likely determine the future evolution of proprietary cities.

Dubai, though not a proprietary city itself, offers a glimpse of what crude proprietary cities could become.  A society segmented by class, South East Asians providing the manual labor, admittedly at higher wages than they could get at home, but without many basic freedoms, and Europeans.  There is little mixture between the classes, and no hope for the South East Asians to enter the upper class.

On a more theoretical level, we can consider the limits of proprietary cities.  Private spheres allow for action that is unacceptable in public spheres.  If you visit my house, I am perfectly within my rights to restrict your actions.  I may ask you not to voice certain opinions or to enter without my permission.

This line, however, becomes blurry as private spaces enter commercial arrangements.  The argument for banning discrimination based on race is that business is fundamentally different from residence.  The sphere of action businesses can take is more restricted than the private sphere one can take in one’s home.

As nominally private enterprises scale, the distinctions further blur.  In a company town, should the company be legally allowed to restrict speech critical of the company?  Aside from legality, morally, should it?

When considering proprietary cities, we can compare Dubai and Hong Kong.  Do we want a city where manual laborers are second class citizens, unable to participate in the public sphere, or a city where the poor have comparable opportunities to the wealthy?  Hong Kong is obviously not an ideal liberal city, but it is far ahead of Dubai.

I have argued that proprietary cities be given institutional autonomy as well.  With such autonomy it seems reasonable for the host country to ask for certain procedural safeguards for civil liberties.  A bill of rights, if you will, protecting the residents rights to speech, religion, association, protest, fair trials, and more.

While I strongly support political decentralization, there are differing visions on how a decentralized world would appear.  It could be fragmented into different groups, with little trust and interaction between the groups, with no group representing liberal ideals.  On the other hand, decentralization could allow us to escape modern tyranny, experiment with better governance, and kept intact basic values which continue to hold us together.  With regard to proprietary cities, the latter must be fought for.

Advertisements

Should Google run a city?

The Freeman was nice enough to publish my piece asking whether Google should run a city.

Would you want to live in a private city?

No? What if Google were running the city? Would that change your mind? Google building and running cities is less crazy than you think.

Google has expressed interest in constructing cities, and Larry Page wants to create autonomous zones that can experiment with social rules. Combined, these two ideas have the potential to transform the world. Institutional change can jumpstart economic growth while competent, efficient administration can ensure those gains are not lost to corruption.

I think Silicon Valley could become an extremely powerful force for local autonomy. They have the money and interest. That being said, I believe they have much to learn on the political and legal side. However, they are hardly alone in that respect. Few understand the importance of legal institutions to economic development.

Secession lagniappe

Catalonia’s unofficial referendum has 81 percent voting for independence according to preliminary reports, though many pro-Madrid groups boycotted it. The government also moved in a significant amount of military assets prior to the vote. How Madrid is making things worse.

Go read that whole thread, it’s a nice overview of progressives’ ambiguous feelings about secession.

Don Gonyea:

Well, for the Republicans, they are in their best position in the states in a century. For Democrats, they’re in their worst position since something called the Civil War.

The North-South divide is deepening

Marriage and union membership

Why the GOP should embrace Rand Paul’s “conservative realist” foreign policy

Hawaiian restoration activists are continuing to hold the bootlicking Office of Hawaiian Affairs accountable

Independent joins the Arlington County Board

Secessionist joins the Anne Arundel County Board

Left-wing secessionist calls for Portland to leave Maine

Interesting New York partition thread

Ed Sebesta gets quoted in this story on UDC renting a Richmond church

Matthew McConaughey signs on for a movie about the Free State of Jones

Malibu wants its own school district

Rod Dreher: “No bishop will die for religious liberty”

Patrick Deneen in Cato Unbound:

Those Christians and other religious believers who resist the spirit of the age will be persecuted – not by being thrown to lions in the Coliseum, but by judicial, administrative, and legal marginalization.  They will lose many of the institutions that they built to help the poor, the marginalized, the weak, and the disinherited.  But finding themselves in the new imperium will call out new forms of living the Christian witness.  They will live in the favelas, providing care for body and soul that cannot not be provided by either the state or the market.  Like the early Church, they will live in a distinct way from the way of the empire, and their way of life will draw those who perhaps didn’t realize that this was what Christianity was, all along.  When the liberal ideology collapses – as it will – the Church will remain, the gates of Hell not prevailing against it.

*****

(more…)

Secession lagniappe

Journalists don’t really know how to talk about secession:

For example, look at how The Root is describing the proposed incorporation of St. George in East Baton Rouge Parish:

The rich, white folk who live in Baton Rouge, La., want to secede and form their own town called St. George.

Or at least that’s how their critics are articulating the initiative, the BBC reports. The secession, of sorts, is being sold as a well-intentioned plan that will allow St. George’s hypothetical residents to gain more control over how their tax dollars are being spent to improve public education and other services. But because St. George’s racial makeup would be 70 percent white, skeptics are seeing the initiative as nothing more than a new-age attempt at white flight or a gerrymandering of sorts.

The problem is, St. George isn’t part of Baton Rouge city, it’s part of East Baton Rouge Parish, and they just want to form a new city within it.

Two treaties, between Hawaii and Spain, and Hawaii and Denmark, which Hawaiian independence advocates claim are still in force.

You know why I love Examiner.com? Because their “Honolulu Political Buzz Examiner” is Michael Salla, who also runs an institute on political relations with extra-terrestrials. Anyway, for what it’s worth he and others are claiming that the feds are going ahead with their plan to recognize the native ancestry roll as a federal tribe. Virtually no Hawaiian independence advocates support the effort.

(more…)

Secession lagniappe

Native Planet on Hawaiian sovereignty:

The Obama administration is abandoning plans to treat the OHA as a tribe, but is apparently still planning to screw over sovereignty supporters:

Because of the overwhelming numbers of testifiers throughout Hawai`i as well as the US that stated they were against the DOI proposed plans, both in person at the hearings and online, the US Department of Interior itself has decided not to issue any new rules or re-recognition.

However, because those few who would stand to benefit directly from such a move have lobbied the White House intensely, the Obama administration will instead either issue an executive policy statement (as was done in Alaska) federally recognizing the Native Hawaiian roll, or they will instruct the DOI to issue an administrative policy that the Obama administration will then support.

Either of these actions are actually worse than any DOI rule making.

This yet to be announced policy statement will empower OHA and the Roll Commission to form a governing entity that will be rubber stamped with no oversight or advance public input whatsoever.

Bill Kauffman’s speech at LPAC this year (read the whole thing). I called Campaign for Liberty yesterday to get on their case for taking so long to put the speech on YouTube. Hopefully it’ll be up soon, I’ll post it here when it is:

Under the Hillary Clintons and the bevy of squawking Republican chickenhawks, America is never to be a country at peace. We would live out our lives in a bleak future of endless war, endless mobilization, in a regimented and increasingly paranoid nation on red alert. Peace, to our mandarins, is unthinkable. An America that is small, that is modest, that is humble, that speaks in a dizzingly beautiful variety of accents: unthinkable.

That nightmare bears no resemblance to the country that is in my heart and in my eyes.  Their empire isn’t a country at all—it’s the cold projection of military might, of political influence—it’s the enemy, above all, of the real America, the Little America, the America that plays the unheard music.

I am a patriot. And I love my country. And this country is only healthy insofar as its little pieces are healthy. Lowell, Massachusetts. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Batavia, New York. Red Cloud, Nebraska. Muscle Shoals, Alabama. I saw the distinct identity—the meaning—of my own place fading and that’s why I raised my voice.

That’s why hundreds of thousands—millions—of Americans from the Gulfstream waters to the Redwood forests are raising their voices. We refuse to lose our country.

Speak, act, even vote, if that’s your thing, for place. For peace. For the possibility of a life that is not lived in the dark shadow of perpetual war and crony capitalist oligarchy but rather in the reviving sunlight of liberty, of community, of home.

(more…)

Secession lagniappe

Don Devine on the secession trend:

American hegemony properly controlled thus assists world peace, and secession could threaten international and domestic liberty. Still, secession in its tamed form of federalism and decentralization presents the secret to domestic liberty, especially in larger states. The ability to devolve power to the lowest levels possible—first to the individual, then to the family, to free associations and businesses, to the community, to local and regional government, and only to the national state when no other institution can perform the function—allows freedom to adjust to community differences and make individuals more satisfied with their national state.

Clark Bianco on the persistence of the English Civil War in our red state-blue state divide:

If you visit a red state you will notice higher than average levels of tobacco use, Evangelical Christianity, Ford F-150s, and so on.

If you visit a blue state you will notice higher than average levels of organic foods,evangelical Brightism, Priuses, and so forth.

To a first approximation, these two bags of cultural signifiers have absolutely nothing to do with King Charles I and Oliver Cromwell and the cultures around them.

In fact, though, if you dig a bit deeper you’ll see that there are very solid strands connecting them. The Parliamentarian Roundheads were made up of Diggers (agrarian socialists – who’d think that farmers would be socially liberal?),Levellers (who were into “popular sovereignty”, which is a fancy political science term for a drum circle, I think) and a bunch of near heretics who’s spiritual descendants believe in Crystal Power and Chakras (or perhaps having their female priests and rabbis perform gay marriages in an inclusive church), and always voting Democrat. In short, you’ve got a pretty similar culture alliance in 1614 as you do in 2014.

WRM on a world in flames:

Obama, Merkel, Cameron and Hollande have made plenty of mistakes on their own; words like “Libya” and “Syria” come to mind. But the rip currents through which they must swim are not entirely of their making. They, and we, are reaping the consequences of bad decisions taken two decades ago, when the skies were still bright and the world was full of hope. For a quarter century now, Western policymakers have assumed that history held no more great challenges on the scale of the colossal crises of the 20th century. They have acted as if we had reached some kind of post-historical utopia, and as if our security and prosperity had become so absolute and so embedded that we no longer needed to concern ourselves with the foundations of the world order.

This was foolishly and tragically wrong. We are not yet back in the worst of the bad old days. We have passed from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. A shadow is stirring in Mirkwood, the orcs are roaming the forests, but the Dark Lord hasn’t returned to his Tower.  The historical clock that seemed to slow in the 1990s is ticking faster now. We can no longer afford to live carelessly and large. The days are getting darker, and if we are to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the last century, there is no time to waste and little to spare.

(more…)