Often public-goods-problems can be broken down to the size of cities. For example, the provision of streets on the scale of nations is easily solvable, but it is not as easy to charge someone for the use of a road on the city-scale. It seems ridiculous to charge someone every few meters for the use of a street.* Similar problems include the provision of security patrols** and sewerage***. These problems can, obviously, be solved if everyone is required to pay for these services. Now my point is, that nowadays HOAs or gated communities, purely private entities, offer similar services with the explicit concent of its “citizens”. It seems this solution is viable. A check on the growth of such private cities would be the enormous number of such cities and the mobility to be expected in future. In essence, it is the reduction of the scale of nations to the city and exchanging democracy with monarchy, Hoppes point, though I think there will be elements of democracy.
Thus I think the dominating form of organizing at least large cities will be that of the minimal state as imagined by Mises. Are there any works about how a city could work without a single owner or as an “anarchic city”?
Given the thoughts above, has anyone literature about pre-industrial Germany? In school I was taught that it was a horrible time for everyone since every of the 400 “nations” did not want to trade with anyone else and it was a constant time of war. Reading about austrian economics, that view seems very flawed. There must be something more than the mere fact of small scale that led to such developments.
- I have read Block’s book about roads, but it does not seem too convincing on the scale I am talking about. Of course it is possible that the people living in the houses will pay for the roads but that breaks the problem only further down to the scale of blocks.
** Of course, only if desired. The problem here is that of a free rider. A patrol in a part of the city reduces overall crime there but only one person pays for the patrol where everyone benefits.
*** Yes, there is the possibility of putting sewage in a tank underground and dispose it annually with a tank waggon, but in a city that does not seem to viable.