Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
Towns vanish as everybody in them starves to death. Well those where they didn't die of thirst first when the aqueducts shut down. You can't even make food an exception - cities can't pay for it without an exception for something they produce too, which will need an exception for the materials they produce it *from* which.... And couldn't transport it anyway what with your cart no longer being your property when it crossed a border.
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In fact, this sounds rather like one of Frédéric Bastiat's satirical essays in the 19th century (published as
Economic Sophisms) in which he proposed variants on the idea that if trade protection and tariffs were so good for the economy, every village and every city neighborhood should have them, and depend on what it produced locally. I seem to recall an essay of his on the "negative railroad" which proposed that there should be a break in the tracks between every two major stops, where goods would have to be transshipped. . . .
Then there's the old Soviet system of internal passports, where movement between different cities required hard-to-obtain bureaucratic permission.