|
Tuesday, 05 September 2006 17:59 |
 | | Carl S. Milsted, Jr. |
A few years ago I was fairly active in the local Rolling Thunder organization. During that time, I got to know many people who favored having more democracy. They meant this in two ways:
1. They wanted more local decisions to be made by the democratic government vs. by businesses.
2. They wanted the government itself to be run more democratically; that is, more direct citizen involvement vs. reliance on elected representatives.
I
found parts of their agenda to be appealing, and other parts to be
downright repulsive. A truly democratic system is much more immune to
certain types of corruption compared to a representative system. To
bribe a democracy requires bribing The People. To bribe a republic
requires bribing just the representatives.
On the other
hand, I do not like the idea of putting too many decisions up for
democratic vote. Being a free spirit, I am often in the minority. Thus,
I find market-based decision-making more appealing generally.
(Actually, many of those same pro-democracy activists retreat from
their calls for unlimited democracy when faced with such issues as
abortion or prayer in the schools.)
Fortunately, it
is possible to make government more democratic, address some of the
land use issues implied in No. 2, while providing for minority rights.
To see how, we must first address some of the other shortcomings of
democracy. There are sound reasons why most of the governments in the
U.S. are based on representatives vs. direct citizen voting.
Consider a small
city with 36,000 eligible voters. In a grueling 10 hour town meeting,
each voter gets one second to speak on average. Obviously, we cannot
allow equal speaking rights and still have meaningful debates.
If we are to
have all governmental decisions (and many economic decisions as these
Rolling Thunder activists advocated), we can expect many such grueling
meetings. We can kiss our weekends goodbye. We can expect tempers to
flare. Eventually, we can expect many absences, with government falling
back into the hands of special interests.
These problems grow worse if we consider a large city.
One possible
solution would be to have representatives craft legislation, but
require citizen ratification through referenda. The problem with this
approach is that most will vote without having heard the background
debate. And since most people "have a life," they will be loath to do
sufficient research on the issues. As the number of voters goes up, the
rationale for doing the research goes down, since the odds of casting
the swing vote becomes minuscule.
Democracy does not scale up.
A better
solution is to scale government down. If we are to have true democracy,
then the term "local government" should be at a level much smaller than
a city. For example, instead of having citywide zoning, each
neighborhood could have its own zoning meetings. Let those who pay the
price of having a busy store next door decide the zoning.
Under such a
system it would be much harder to find a place to put a big "block"
store, since such stores serve more than the local neighborhood, while
generating significant traffic and eyesore externalities. We might end
up having all small shops designed to serve the local neighborhood.
This can be quite inefficient, and can make it hard to find specialty
merchandise. Sears might revive its catalog business under such a
system. Locating factories and office buildings becomes problematic as
well.
Letës try again.
Busy businesses do generate negative externalities, but they also pay
substantial property taxes. If we keep much of the property taxes in
the affected neighborhood, then those taxes can act as compensation for
the externalities. The neighborhood that accepts the block store or the
paper mill gets money for sidewalks, schools, parks and/or lower tax
rates. The exclusive neighborhood that keeps such businesses out has to
pay higher residential property taxes or do without some government
services.
In other words,
by breaking down city government to the neighborhood level we get a
system that acts much more like the market alternative: tradable
property restrictions. Furthermore, by breaking cities into
neighborhoods, people can shop for their preferred balance of tax
rates, aesthetics, shopping convenience, etc. We get more democracy and
a market in government services.
ï
Carl S. Milsted Jr. is chairman of the Libertarian Party of Buncombe County.
|
