Spencer-1

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Joe

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".

Or you know...company towns.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

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.

Can you build one at all? If governments are doing nothing but "enforcing law" the way that is usually meant by anti-government advocates, they can't take land by eminent domain, or even hold public lands they can lease or sell to the rail company. I expect *somebody* will refuse to participate for any major project. Indeed I don't see how they can even build roads in cities.

Not that anyone needs them much. Governments that can only enforce laws can't coin money either, so I don't expect there is much trade.

Worlds with these kind of governments are basically fantasy worlds - they *actual* rule isn't "government enforces laws" or "every interaction is by mutual consent" or whatever the author claims it is. If you look too closely it will almost certainly turn out to be "everyone acts like I think they should" or "the government does all the stuff I approve of, and none of the stuff I don't".

They're basically myth world-lines, analogous to "the kingdom of God" or "true Communism after the withering of the state" or any other utopian dream world. Trying to figure out how the mechanics would "actually" work misses the point - that this rule I like somehow produces this result I like, no matter how impossible that seems to anybody else, is the central conceit of the fantasy.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Can you build one at all? If governments are doing nothing but "enforcing law" the way that is usually meant by anti-government advocates, they can't take land by eminent domain, or even hold public lands they can lease or sell to the rail company. I expect *somebody* will refuse to participate for any major project. Indeed I don't see how they can even build roads in cities.
.

There are workarounds. One is that if you own the land you are developing for sale, the housing development you are building will certainly be worth more if you set aside enough room for roads and actually pave the darn things. Cross-country railroads and roads may end up being unnecessarily twisty just to get past property owners who weren't willing to make an affordable deal but most property owners will actually have something to gain from access to transportation routes so making a deal probably shouldn't be impossible most of the time.

I'm not looking to create an unworkable or dystopian world any more than I want a hand-waved utopia which works because I said so.

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.

[Apollonian]

In this world, who makes the laws that government enforces? Who repeals laws?

To make this a little more workable, I'd define government as the organization that maintains a monopoly on legitimate violence. For whatever reason, this organization provides no other services beyond law enforcement. Does that include enforcing contracts between private parties?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Apollonian

In this world, who makes the laws that government enforces? Who repeals laws?

To make this a little more workable, I'd define government as the organization that maintains a monopoly on legitimate violence. For whatever reason, this organization provides no other services beyond law enforcement. Does that include enforcing contracts between private parties?

Yes of course. And at least in the English common law countries the governments would be the typical legislatures, probably with a franchise still restricted by property ownership. Liberalization just took a different course.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Yes of course. And at least in the English common law countries the governments would be the typical legislatures, probably with a franchise still restricted by property ownership. Liberalization just took a different course.

I don't see any particular reason to set the franchise one way or the other.

Property owners have just as much non law enforcement things they would like the government to do as the lower classes - that road building, coin money, dredge the harbors, impose tariffs, break unions, chase down the runaway serfs, crush new competitors to their existing factories, evict everybody from that slum I want to build on, whatever. It's just a somewhat different set of stuff.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I'm not looking to create an unworkable or dystopian world any more than I want a hand-waved utopia which works because I said so.
.

Since your premise is fundamentally unworkable, you're kind of out of luck there, I'm afraid.

[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.

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by 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.

The first government to break the rule and field an army conquers the world.