Spencer-1

[David Johnston2]

Elsewhere I was answering a question about what things would be like if governments stuck strictly to law enforcement as their only allowed function when it occurred to me that it would make a workable alternate universe to visit. So here's a bit of cut and paste:

So let’s look at things government does that aren’t regulatory in nature:

Road building and repair: This is a big deal. The only paved roads outside of cities would be toll roads for high traffic corridors between relatively close cities. Railroads would be much more important as the only practical way to ship cargo cheaply over long stretches of land. Cross country driving in North America would be an adventure in the worst sense of that road. Planes would probably be smaller and less cost effective because private airports would be smaller with shorter runways on average. Maybe dirigibles would be more competitive. What’s an alternate universe without dirigibles? Cities would be only partially paved where merchants and home-owners associations ponied up for it, meaning that low income city neighborhoods would probably be immediately identifiable by their dirt (or exceptionally stinky mud) roads.

Speaking of stink you can forget about sewer systems and sewage treatment. They’d be rare and limited at best. Flush toilets would be an attribute of the affluent. Lower income life would be pretty deadly. We’d need much larger families to compensate for high levels of infant mortality.

Education: With the only education being private and religious schooling, illiteracy would be much more common. Religions would dominate schooling for the lower economic strata creating a much less secular culture rather closer to the religious culture of the middle east.

Welfare: With a significant proportion of the population reliant on charity for survival, the streets outside of gated communities would be filled with beggars (not to mention prostitutes and pickpockets)

Probably the best place to live for the working class would be company towns. Not being strictly government would mean that companies who ran their own towns would be free to provide things like sanitation, paved roads and schooling.

Mind you taxes would be really low without government having to pay for all that stuff.

[gruundehn]

If you limit government to just law enforcement, what laws exist?

Instead, try limiting government to protecting the rights of the people. You get a working society without many of the ills you manufactured for the government you supposed.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

Instead, try limiting government to protecting the tights of the people.

This is a precious, precious typo.

Who determines what rights people have?

[Flyndaran]

Well there were sumptuary laws that restricted such luxury items like certain items of clothing, and many other things.
But police enforcing the wearing or not wearing of tights is actually quite plausible.

[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.

[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.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

If you limit government to just law enforcement, what laws exist?

Instead, try limiting government to protecting the tights of the people. You get a working society without many of the ills you manufactured for the government you supposed.

Protecting the rights of the people doesn't pave roads and build highways, airports and sewers, provide nigh-universal secular education, or keep the indigent from starving. People don't have a right to those things.

I'm kind of interested in the impact on professional sports without state subsidized arenas.

One thing I didn't do was postulate huge amounts of air pollution, 16 hour work-days, unsafe food and drugs filling the markets, or huge numbers of workplace injuries from unsafe environments because those government functions are regulatory in nature even if they were things governments were slow to actually start doing if at all in the 19th century.

Interesting idea. Are there real world examples anywhere near this level of non-government? Maybe TL5 American West?

A bit of that. A bit of 19th century London particularly in the first half. A bit of the modern Middle East.

[LokRobster]

Interesting idea. Are there real world examples anywhere near this level of non-government? Maybe TL5 American West?

[Joe]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Speaking of stink you can forget about sewer systems and sewage treatment. They’d be rare and limited at best. Flush toilets would be an attribute of the affluent. Lower income life would be pretty deadly. We’d need much larger families to compensate for high levels of infant mortality.

Just to add one more thing to the pile: the failure to devote any public resources to public health, public sanitation, and so on, would certainly have a huge impact on the health of normal people, just as you say - but it would probably also have a pretty serious negative impact on the health of the rich, too. Disease travels!

Poor and average people would suffer most, of course, but even those few people rich enough to invest in decent sanitation for themselves alone would be exposed to all sorts of diseases incubated elsewhere. If any part of a society is incubating disease on a large scale, then the whole society suffers to some degree.

This would be yet another incentive for the rich and powerful to isolate themselves from the rest of society, exacerbating the already strong tendency of such a system to degenerate into a two tier system of elite "haves" and majority "have-nots". Yet it's really difficult for a group to isolate itself completely, so the rich would still be vastly worse off, health-wise, than they would have been in a system that devoted public resources to public sanitation and public health. After all, some normal folk probably have to be in fairly close prozimity to the rich folk on a regular basis, even if only to serve them, cook their food, etc etc....