Spencer-1

[gruundehn]

Originally Posted by Anders

This is a precious, precious typo.

Who determines what rights people have?

Fixed, I was in a hurry when I first wrote this.

[gruundehn]

Having given your post more thought, governments write laws so your examples are incorrect. A government can give itself the authority to build roads, control education, force charity or whatever absent an overriding law that is hard to change. Any world with a government restricted to enforcing the law can easily use the power to write the law to establish a despotism of the first magnitude. Whoever controls the legislature controls the country, world or whatever.

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I cut the questioner some slack and assumed that border defense was included in "law enforcement"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight...Highway_System

"One of Eisenhower's enduring achievements was championing and signing the bill that authorized the Interstate Highway System in 1956.[136] He justified the project through the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 as essential to American security during the Cold War. It was believed that large cities would be targets in a possible war, hence the highways were designed to facilitate their evacuation and ease military maneuvers."

It is argued that prussia restricted child labor because conditions in factories and mines impacted the health of future conscripts negatively, and the army complained.

In other words, if the government does "defense" you can justify anything. Public Health ? Defense against biological weapons. Public schools ? Needed to get literate conscripts. Welfare ? Protection against foreign agitators. And so on.

OTOH, defense requires money, infrastructure, an educated population, production capabilities, etc. If you skimp on them too badly, other countries will be/get stronger, and after some time you may be in trouble unless you compete.

[The Colonel]

How strictly are we defining "government" here? If the people of the town hold a meeting and decide that they will form a municipal sanitation corporation and dig some sewers because they're sick of the smell of their own crap, is that local government or collective private action?

If you're looking for a eutopian* model, it may work to postulate a world in which consocial bodies handle a wide range of activities.

As for railways ... presumably they could still be built by anyone who notices that they could make a profit moving large volumes of anything from A to B (coal, steel and beef are all traditional favourites). Likewise highways - probably as toll roads as the majority of early modern highway building was.

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

That being said, one thing I can imagine are really bad neighbourhoods which as evolved shanty towns don't even have roads wide enough for practical motor vehicle access. Nobody living there had a vehicle more expensive than a bicycle so it just wasn't an issue. It would help keep law enforcement out and that's good for gaming.

You can see this sort of place for real in plenty of parts of the world.




*Using the correct Greek here, not the conventional.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

How strictly are we defining "government" here? If the people of the town hold a meeting and decide that they will form a municipal sanitation corporation and dig some sewers because they're sick of the smell of their own crap, is that local government or collective private action?.

Customarily proponents of this sort of thing draw the line at compulsion. If people who don't care about the smell are not required to pay any money, allow any construction across their own property, or face any fines when they continue to dump their sewage in their bit of a stream instead of hooking up to the sewer, it's not "government".

But yes, a common problem of utopian schemes is in the definitions. The reason real government is messy and real law codes are convoluted isn't because an evil conspiracy makes them that way, but because that proved necessary for them to more or less function the way somebody wanted. Simple forms always turn out to either fail to do stuff everybody agrees is vital, hide the complexity by using a "simple" term that becomes convoluted when you look at it closely ("greatest good" is a popular one), or contain internal contradictions that will require regenerating all that messy complexity to sort out if anybody ever did implement them.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Pomphis

In other words, if the government does "defense" you can justify anything. Public Health ? Defense against biological weapons. Public schools ? Needed to get literate conscripts. Welfare ? Protection against foreign agitators. And so on.

A government that "enforces laws" can justify anything too. "We only have one law - all persons are required to instantly obey any command of the king, or those he has delegated his authority to, on pain of summary execution or any other punishment the authority may choose to impose. What could be simpler?" That's not what anybody means when they talk about "rule of law" though. One of the hidden complexities of these things is what the laws actually are.

[Anders]

What you need is an ideological compass to guide you to what the state should and shouldn't do. Otherwise you can motivate practically anything, yes.

[Michele]

Let me look at this from the POV of a worker living in a company town in this world.

There is somebody who paves the streets, and maintains them. It will also issue company bye-laws according to which it is forbidden to dig holes in the streets.
I might not be paying taxes to this somebody specifically for these tasks, but surely that somebody takes into account the advantage for me of having a paved street in front of my house, when that same somebody calculates my paycheck.

So, how is that somebody different from a government in this world, for me? It provides a service to me, and it has regulatory functions.

Sure, I don't get to choose the decision-takers. Shareholders chose the CEOs, and the CEOs will appoint a mayor to run the company town. While that's different from how a democratic government works today in this world, it's not unlike how governments worked for unfranchised people for centuries.

Secondly, the company town mayor does not police the town - or does he? Theoretically, in this world the only task of the government is exactly that, law enforcement. In practice, somebody will be electing that government, and a legislative body to draw those laws that are to be enforced. This all boils down to the companies spending money to have their men in the legislative body, and if at all possible in the government. And they will make sure that the government delegates at least the minor policing functions (somebody to prevent me from digging a hole in that paved street, or at least for fining me if I do) to the companies running the towns, themselves.

Another look at it from another POV.

Let's say I'm rich, instead of a common worker. In this world, almost by definition I'm living in a gated community. Which will still have paved streets. And a somebody paving them, maintaining them, and passing regulations against holes.

It's a government, providing services other than law enforcement and issuing regulations.

In this case, I do get to choose that government. It will be something like a council of the owners, which will be chosen by me and my peers in the community. And I will be directly paying the community for the service.

But this just boils down to an oligarchy, a traditional form of government in this world. And with a census requirement: should I get too poor to pay my dues, they'll throw me out of the community.

As to the government's police... why should we landowners accept that? We'll have our own private security, thanks. And we'll lobby the legislative body to make sure that private security is as unfettered as it gets.

Now a third POV.

I'm dead broke and I live in a shantytown in this world. The alleys are unpaved, and I don't pay anything for the alleys. And there are no regulations about the alleys. The government's police might come into the shantytown from time to time, or not.

Yet, suppose I decide to dig a well at the center of a crossing of two alleys. There may be no explicit regulations. There may be no service for the alleys, and no taxes to pay for those. There may be no formal somebody to intervene when I dig. There may be no local police and the governmental one might not show up.

And... my neighbors will show up in numbers, and tell me very clearly that I must stop digging that well right there. Not just that; there will be a service to be rendered, i.e. filling the hole again. Guess who's going to do it, like it or not?
The regulation is implicit, the service is implicit, the local government is informal, and the local policing is spontaneous; but they all still exist, even in this government-lite world.

In a nutshell, throw the government out of the door and it will come back in through the window.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

The only paved roads outside of cities would be toll roads

Nothing prohibits a construction company -- or a "non-profit" corporation -- from taking up a collection to build the road, either at once or over some time period, and then allowing any traffic on the road, without having toll gates and per-vehicle stops. In academic theory, free riders would destroy the system, as everyone (not just a few) mindlessly follows one optimal ridge, without any consequences absent guns and jackboots to enforce a law. In practice, though, such schemes can often work tolerably well.

You can quibble that this would be "government", if merely local government, but in that case, every group action is always "government" at some scale. One road-building entity with a single cause, no particular monopoly of force, and not connected to all the other functions we lump under "government", can't really be called "government" without assuming that the setting is impossible by definition.

It's probably also worth noting that even traditional real-world government often builds toll roads of the pay-per use type. The current trend is to convert old, existing lanes of freely accessible highway to some form of pay-per-mile or pay-when-congested access. Electronics are making it possible for governments to add even more individual tolls, rather than continuing the collective public-good system -- and they do. Tolls aren't a necessary consequence or unique marker of private versus public funding.

Similarly, someone could build long-haul roads. Railroads have no special advantage that makes them more amenable to private construction than concrete and asphalt. And note that in the US, while the Interstate highways were certainly a big government project, the transcontinental railroads were also built with government money. Whether you build trains or trucks is more a matter of the technology of the time than of the constructing organization, as well as what material you have to transport. (Moving coal for industry a different problem that moving people for business or tourism.) If you simply want railroads in the setting because you're a railroad fan, it's a plausible-enough excuse. But it could just as easily go the other way, or both ways together (as in our world).

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Nothing prohibits a construction company -- or a "non-profit" corporation -- from taking up a collection to build the road,
....
Similarly, someone could build long-haul roads. Railroads have no special advantage that makes them more amenable to private construction than concrete and asphalt.

As MA Lloyd already wrote, the problem is eminent domain. Without a government using force to take private property for road or railroad building, you can be sure that somewhere some landowner will either say "no" or demand so much money that the project becomes unfeasible.