Peter Saint-Andre of Denver, Colorado, is a software developer and Director of Standards at Jabber, Inc. He has also contributed to the Jabber/XMPP open instant messaging protocol and developer community since 1999; he currently serves as Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation. His blog is at stpeter.im.
"Hi, I was looking through Google just now, and I happened upon your article on Libertarianism in urban areas. Since I saw the date on it, though, I just wanted to email you my response.
I think you have a strong point on how libertarianism and its tenets only appeal to the more rural and conservative areas of the country, and also on how socialism and its tenets have more of a de-facto grounding in the institutions of the urban, more population-intensive areas. However, I think that the government regulation only became that prominent of a feature of urban life because of how groups or individuals needed a "trusted arbiter" that would regulate and allocate resources (such as water, electricity, gas) in the most efficient manner possible. The citizens of an urban area aren’t exactly equipped to provide similar services to themselves and their families (not enough land to grow their own food, although urban farms do exist), so they have to depend upon the government, which owns the few large-scale means to provide such amenities to the populace (the city reservoir, the city power plant, etc.).
Now, what would urban libertarianism look like? What prerequisites should be in place for the existence of a libertarian urbanity, or an urban area in which libertarian, individualistic values are held in higher regard than those which explicitly or exclusively favor corporate entities (such as a business or the city government)?
Well, IMO, a libertarian urbanity would be one in which:
- All households – whatever sexual, religious, racial/ethnic/color, gender, lingual or political orientation – will possess the means to process their own exclusive services – water, gas, electricity, internet, housing – for their own members.
- All households will possess the means, the education, and the capacity to process these services.
- The city government will only intervene if a) one household infringes upon another household’s ability to process these services or b) a household falls behind in its ability to process these services.
- Households will possess the privilege to share their services with, or sell them to other households if they desire, but will possess the ability to withdraw the availability of these services from the other households, at which point the other households should be able to revert back to their own mediums of household-specific service provision.
Of course, that would be a dream for anyone – that one would be able to create his own internet, own his own freshwater reservoir in the backyard, have a solar panel on the roof or an iron rod going a mile or two into the earth’s crust, or grow a garden of medicinal herbs.
However, I have my doubts. How biased can this system, if ever implemented, become to the favor of those who have gained a monetary or educational headstart in this society? Can the "have-not-as-muchs" of the U.S. (a good deal of whom, stereotypically, live in the urban areas) have the same routes, or at least some capable, rigorous enablements, to the position of determining the fates of their households?
My fear is that, with all the focus on the individual and his/her household, the urban society (in which no man is his own island) will become stratified into three specific entities: the "haves" who are their own individual corporations, the "have-not" majority which is client to Dick and Tom, Inc., and the government, which, being a libertarian-oriented entity, will most certainly conduct itself in the favor of the having individuals.
Maybe there is a way to avert such stratifications and impasses in the creation of a libertarian urbanity. I just don’t know if we, the urban people, are that much ready for libertarianism on such a scale. Maybe libertarianism is just too ornery of a socio-political value system that it can only appeal to the disgruntled conservatives in rural Colorado, and its greater proponents haven’t necessarily found themselves in urban settings, where everything that we do or say is, well, social.
Maybe progressive libertarianism , or libertarian socialism is in order?
Sincerely,
Harry Underwood
Warner Robins, GA"
"Hi Rayne, thanks for saying hello.
These matters are subtle and complex. I feel like I keep nibbling at the edges. Why do people think as they do or believe as they believe? I
don’t claim to understand why certain people are conservatives or libertarians or socialists or anarchists or anything else. Are you aware
of any large-scale studies on the matter (not anecdotes, but science)?
I think you make a good point about the provision of services in cities, but I don’t think it explains the difference. After all, people in rural
areas are quite dependent on government-provisioned electrical power, roads, and the like. At least in the States, farmers in rural areas
receive big subsidies from the government, yet they vote for the right, not the left. And people in cities tend to be more libertarian about
certain aspects of life (recreational drug use, alternative lifestyles, etc.). Maybe the real problem is not the cities, but the suburbs.
I have come to think that we will never see a truly free society until the bonds of civil society become much stronger, thus leading people to
see that they don’t need government for many of the services they have come to depend on. That may involve micro-power generation and so on.
You touch on something that I think is a big part of the picture: impinging on others. In a sense, as you say, everything in a city is
social, or has social implications. This makes the relatively simple libertarianism of our forefathers difficult to apply.
Here is an example. Where I live, there is construction going on all round (lots of developers tearing town small, older houses and putting
up big, new ones). Property rights advocates say "that’s great, people have the right to develop their property, zoning is evil", etc. But the
common law also recognizes the right to the peaceful use and enjoyment of your property. My wife and I have lived with construction noise from 7 AM in the morning to 7 or 8 or 9 PM in the evening, 6 or 7 days a week, for almost 2 years. Denver has a noise regulation that says you can’t produce excessive noise on your property (loud parties and the like). Now maybe libertarians would prefer a 100% tort-based solution instead of a regulatory solution (noise ordinance), and ideally my wife and I would too. The noise ordinance is a proxy for what might occur if there were completely tort-based solutions. Interestingly, the developers lobbied the city government for an exemption (the property developers pretty much run the city). So you could argue that our right to the peaceful use and enjoyment of our property is being violated, while their right to develop their property is being maximized.
The challenge is that when you have more people living nearly on top of each other, such overlapping rights become commonplace. So it’s harder to see how it is possible to respect everyone’s rights. I have found that what most libertarians do is throw their hands up in despair and move out to the boonies (where such conflicts don’t occur, or at least don’t occur as often or as easily). So the folks who are left in the
cities are people who are more comfortable with regulatory solutions. I don’t necessarily say they are "socialists" because, having lived for a
time in a near-socialist country for a little while (Czechoslovakia right after the fall of the Iron Curtain), I think I understand what true socialism is like. America has never been a socialist country in that sense (public ownership of the means of production etc.) even at the height of the New Deal, and it never will be. Personally I think we need to worry more about a fascist America than a socialist America, but that’s a bigger topic…
Peter"
Mr. Saint-Andre has given permission to publish this dialogue under any open license, so this will be distributed under a CC-PD license (although I wish that there was an FD option provided by the CC folks). This dialogue through email was done on August 21, 2007.
