Because a HOA is created by contract, it can also be eliminated by contract. You can go to the co-proprietors of the HOA and buy out their right of participation. If you have a house in the neighborhood and want to get rid of the HOA you don’t have to leave the neighborhood, you can simply offer your neighbors a new contractual arrangement and then pay them in exchange for signing it.
There is no such arrangement with regards to cities because they are government monopolies. If someone could buy the votes to control the city then it would be like a HOA.
Government is legitimate if it is consented to. The right to govern is given by the consent of the governed. If you choose to be under the rule of someone else(whether it be a “government” or an HOA), then libertarians have no problem with it. Libertarian’s have problem’s with government’s that are compulsory and those that you are forced to participate in.
“Love it or leave it” arguments are perfectly acceptable arguments…for private property. In the case of the government, they don’t have any legitimate rule over your property if you never gave consent and therefore, “love it or leave it” doesn’t apply.
Interesting. It is possible to recontract an HOA, but only if the other HOA members agree. (They could choose to refuse to modify the contract and then you’re SOL.)
And isn’t it possible to do the same with government? I could, for example, try to buy a change to a government by paying the electorate to support my view. E.g., I could post a bond and say, “If this state adopts this new constitution I have drafted, I will pay every registered voter in the state $1000.” So just as you can try to buy changes to HOA contracts, you can try to buy changes to government. Does that make such a democratic government legitimate (even though it has a coercive monopoly)?
This debate over HOA’s is pretty ridiculous, imo. Most HOA’s are implimented by the government in the first place. Second of all, they are much smaller in scope than any state is, as such there are plenty of places to move to without an HOA. There is pretty much nowhere to go where there is not a ruler that is livable. Lastly, they have far fewer powers than a state does. HOA’s are hardly similar to states.
Dbooksta, i do not think it would be plausible that every bit of land would be part of a HOA.
As soon as some land starts to confrom, the “free” land will be more and more expensive, and some people will hold out no matter what the price
However, let us imagine that this did happen. There would not be one HOA becuase people would only join one if they agreed to most of the rules. Therefore, just like any free market there would be competition between these HOA’s to attract people to live in theirs and not the others.
This is unlike government becuase it does not compete for you, unless alot of states opened all their borders for mass immigration
Back to the point, even if all the land was controlled (again i dont see happening), isnt it better to at least have a choce of HOA rather then no choice at all?
Absolutely – runner up to “small government is beautiful” would be “local government is beautiful.” The less power the federal governments have, the more potential variety and competition we get at the state/municipal level.
You address my question on the inevitability of government – it would stand to reason that “free” land would command a premium, yet at some point every state in the union decided that they would rather join the federal government. So I’m left thinking that in principle government isn’t inevitable, but that large groups of voters apparently can’t resist government in practice!
My other purpose in the discussion is more to get a coherent delineation between “bad” involuntary government and “good” voluntary contracts. I am still not convinced that HOAs are fundamentally different from government; only that we reserve the word “government” for perpetual associations that are too big to buy out or too inconvenient to move away from. Which leaves me, as I suggested earlier, unable to argue that government is in principle any less legitimate than any voluntary contract.
I must disagree because you have missed the point. Small government is not the same as local government. Local government can have powers as tyrannical, and sometimes more so, than national government. This is what is missing from your reasoning - power. HOAs are limited in what they can do by a market, but local governments are protected from the market by coercion. That is what grants them their power and makes them so destructive.
You are right about the difference between local and national government, but I think there is a link between them, depending on how centralized or decentralized is the country.
I think that to answer to the question of this forum we should introduce the variable of time (short term and long term). We all agree that the ultimate goal towards freedom would be the disappearance of Government, so in the long term “Big Government” is not acceptable.
In the short term, we could accept different sizes of the Government temporarily, fighting night and day against it, moving in the direction of liberty. Breaking all the barriers slowly but steadily, like little ants. We could think of small steps taken with one target in our minds, in other words, having a small and peacefull revolution everyday.
Here’s a suggestion: use the word “state” for “bad government”. Government in general is a neutral word that has multiple meanings. State has a very precise meaning.
Stranger is precisely correct - HOA’s do not constitute a state, because their power is limited by the voluntary nature of the contracts. Because states are involuntary, they tend to create laws that not everyone would voluntarily consent to. Yet these laws are enforced on those who have not consented! By definition, voluntary membership organizations don’t do this.
Even if every square inch of a territory was controlled by an HOA, you could still choose whether to enter a given one. You could also choose to leave the territory. If your private property is part of the territory in question, then it is so because you consented for it to be so. Or the previous owner consented for it to be so, and you bought it knowing this was the case. If you want to get out of the HOA and there is no exit clause in the contract - well then you should have read the contract better when you bought the property… and on and on…
Consider another market case - food. You HAVE to eat (or die). This does not make food selection involuntary or coercive. Same with any other product - even HOA’s.
The whole notion of a perpetual contract seems anti-libertarian to me. Didn’t Rothbard draw a distinction between contracts in which property titles were transferred, and mere promises?
So, one could voluntarily enter into an HOA agreement, gaining the benefits thereof in exchange for whatever fees and restrictions it places upon him, but it could not bind him in perpetuity. If it attempts to enforce such a perpetual “contract,” I think that does qualify as assuming state-like powers unto itself.
If the HOA actually owned the property, and leased or rented it to tenants, that’s one matter, but for it to assume authority over property whose title is owned by somebody else would be exercising tyrannical power.
I was under the impression that the covenant is the agreement which is entered into, not a property in and of itself. Do HOAs employ some other definition of the term than is found in a standard dictionary?
Who holds the title to the actual physical property, i.e. the land and house?
So, are you suggesting that the HOA owns the land but not the house on it? That seems to be the clearest analogy to condos, where the owners of the individual living units are not the owners of the structure.