I have a house in Costa Rica where there a lot of expats living in communities need to self organize because zoning and permit laws are slow, bureaucratic, and basically unenforced.
I cannot tell you how insanely inefficient and impossible it is to get 40 different families who all live on the same street to unanimously agree on something like a communal security system or a communal garbage can where all participants all fairly contribute and consume those services. And this is all done on a WhatsApp group over txt messages where nuance gets lost.
People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.
So you are trying to DIY a government but with no prior experience? Sounds like a nightmare.
That’s basically what a Homeowner’s Association is. They can levy fees, prosecute violations of bylaws, and generally do whatever the bylaws say. They have very little oversight.
Well, everybody says that all governments in the world are absolutely incompetent, so it couldn't possibly be worse... or could it?
Somehow the anarchists never seem to expect people to use their newfound freedom to erect a new government in place of the old.
Wherever there is no government, more government appears to fill the vacuum,
Heck, even roving bandits in the absence of any government proper are a government of a sort. Just a really bad one.
> roving bandits in the absence of any government proper are a government of a sort.
Very experienced players eventually come to realize most governments eventually devolve to not be much different than non-roving, entrenched bandits. :-)
Somehow the fascists never seem to expect that an authoritarian would use their newfound power to hurt their in-group.
Who needs fascists when our existing politicians in Western democracies are already hurting us?
Who said they weren't?!
This is literally what American HOAs are becoming.
Fun fact! What would be an illegal bribe to a city employee (eg planning/permitting department) isn't illegal if it's an HOA instead.
No wonder they're popping up everywhere!
They're not popping up anywhere. They're only ever installed in a brand-new development. (Okay, I'm sure somewhere at least one, probably very small, neighborhood has voluntarily formed one for some specific reason, but in general.)
They are in all new developments in most states because the suburb model is financially unsustainable (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 for the argument why), so, if you want to build a nice new development, the town/city is going to say "Who's gonna maintain that little park? Who's gonna cut the grass in the green spaces? Who's gonna sweep the streets?" etc. Not to mention, every amenity outside individual homes (clubhouse, pool, playground) etc. needs to be maintained. Cities can't afford to take them on as public parks, and the individual neighborhoods whose home prices paid for their construction don't really want them to be public either.
And the developer needs to have an entity with which all these responsibilities will vest when they're done building, so, HOA needs to exist.
The alternative is either no shared amenities of any kind, or trying to get the whole city to approve paying for the perpetual maintenance of a new public park when building a new housing tract. Good luck getting that passed, since most existing residents (besides the ones in the next tract over) would say "F that, I'd never go there, why should my taxes pay for it?"
Commercial bribery is a thing. Many places have laws against bribing an employee of a private organization to violate their duties.
Precisely. But it's very hard to discover what the HOA is like before moving, unlike, say, a town. In some cases you literally would have to pay money to get a copy of the regulations. The neighborhood I live in now has a couple minor nuisances that a HOA would probably fix, but I'm happier living there than in a microprincipality run on nosiness and passive aggression.
Huh? I'm not trying to do anything per se. But the 40 people in the community are trying to create a safe and clean neighborhood environment.
That literally sounds like a DIY Government.
Sounds like organizing a community vs establishing an entity and enforcing its rules.
Are HOAs considered a DIY government?
No. They are built by a conglomerate of local real estate developers according to blueprints shared through their PE parent companies. Corporatocracy.
I'd say so. It sure looks, walks and smells like a government. They're often responsible for things that ought to be the local council's job, and have a tendency to enact rules which will lead to consequences if not followed (just being able to be fined by one, even if the rules are reasonable, sure does make one feel like a government). It's all on a smaller scale than the government-government, but that doesn't really make it a non-government to me.
Yes of course they are.
> impossible it is to get 40 different families who all live on the same street to unanimously agree on something
There's your problem. You are requiring unanimous agreement? Republics (et al.) were invented for a reason.
That is exactly the point OP is making. If you do not have a mandate to govern from the people, you need unanimity from all homeowners. Those are the alternatives.
> If you do not have a mandate to govern from the people, you need unanimity from all homeowners. Those are the alternatives.
You don't strictly need a mandate from the people; authoritarian governments can be legitimate despite not having such a mandate. However, it's an impossible trilemma: successful action needs at least one of unanimity (parent commenter's approach), threat of coercion (government), or tolerance of free-riding (charity).
Why would you leave out the form specified by the GP? Representative (republican) government where the 40 members would hold an election to nominate a smaller number of representatives to decide on what should be done and bind everyone to abide by their decisions.
If you require unanimity then everyone has veto power over every decision which is difficult to manage even with 40 people. If you select 5 or even 3 people out of that group of 40 then it become much easier to make a decision. If everyone can nominate and vote for their representatives then they should feel it is fair when they have to abide by their decisions. At such a small scale you have very direct access to your elected representatives so you should feel that they have heard everyone's opinions and will hopefully do their best to accommodate them and if they don't then you should not elect the same people again.
At this scale you really can't call it threat of coercion, the land isn't owned by a separate entity so individuals could choose not to participate and all participants have direct access as well as a significant weight to their vote. It is a self-binding agreement if you choose a representative.
Sure, there's no threat of coercion for OP's street (or whatever) since nobody involved has any license to exercise power over the collective. But I thought the person you replied to was speaking of any group of people in general.
In the case of the 40 people, if a few of them consider whatever proposal stupid they can ignore it (e.g. not pay their share of something).
If they organize a republican government and have 4 representatives, some of the citizens could still refuse to pay (even if they accepted at first the election of the Street Senators). Coercion is what makes, say, Rhode Island, different than that person's street because if a few Rhode Islanders decide property taxes are stupid and refuse to pay, eventually all their land will be confiscated and they'll be dragged off of it by armed police.
20 wolves and 10 sheep elect 3 representatives ...
Can AI help here? Asking seriously
There are plenty of other alternatives. Where do you think organized crime came from?
"Where do you think organized crime came from?"
Where do you think governments come from?
The oldest Epos we have, Gilgamesh (from the top of my head):
"We came early in the morning. Anyone opposing, we killed. We took everything.
...
until they learned it was better to submit to us."
The rest is how he became then a king, but got bored and now thought, might as well be a good king (but that too got booring, so he got onto adventures angering the gods).
So this is the founding mythos of Babylon. Often considered the root of civilisation.
I like Gilgamesh and I don't recognize that part. My translation has "the king should be a shepherd to his people" on the first page. This is part of complaining about Gilgamesh's arrogance, which is why the gods have to distract him by creating Enkidu, his equal. I mean sure, Gilgamesh is an asshole, a liability, but the text seems to know that.
It was pretty much in the beginning, will have to look it up (has been ages).
" Gilgamesh is an asshole, a liability, but the text seems to know that."
Kind of? It is not really condemned I think. He is still their powerful (god)king and might is right. (So he had the right to be an asshole).
You're going down a slippery slope... a few more ideas like that and you will be creating... a government.
Isn't the alternative to government being slow government being fast? It's just that it can be fast by disregarding democracy, which is bad.
You actually have a slow government and are complaining about it. You have not experienced any alternative to slow government.
It can be fast by disregarding consensus, which is different from democracy. The power of democratically elected executives is that they are, unless otherwise bound by rule or regulation, free to execute very quickly, but they will (generally) align those actions with the will of the majority of the public if they want to be re-elected. Elected legislators are a bit different but the same principle more or less applies; by trading consensus for majority acceptance, you can move faster. This is largely what distinguishes anarchists from lower case D democrats.
Somehow places like Singapore figured it out and it works well for them
As a defacto single party state, Singapore is definitely in the category of "disregarding democracy" like the above poster said
"What a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy" - Lee Kwan Yue
They essentially aren't describing a government. It's just a community, and yes, communities tend to suck because once you get over about 10 people you've got enough voices represented that no one anywhere can agree on anything. A majority rule just means you've got 10 people livid and 10 people maybe happy, and you can't even do that in these cases because you lack what a government has, which is authority.
As they pointed out it's hard to get anyone to do their fair share, and unlike a government which can just MAKE you, they have no such option.
Government is community
Eh not really? Sounds nice, but the most important part of government is authority. If i tell my neighbor I will lock him in a room unless they pay their taxes, i'm a fucking lunatic. It is 100% within the governments right however to do so.
You don't have to have the monopoly on violence to be the government, but it's often a defining feature, and where their authority stems from. A bunch of people together is just a community, and has no legal or other form or authority. If one of them decides to start stealing from the others, the appropriate retribution is mostly going to depend on who caught them.
At that point you're closer to libertarian/anarchy which, technically, is a form of government, but often defined by its lack of one. You arguably have small governments all over the world where that's how it works, but there's pretty clean lines when discussing these things.
Hell technically it's not a government unless it's running a state which is where a lot of this stems from.
So your saying authority is usually necessary to make large groups run well
>Hell technically it's not a government unless it's running a state which is where a lot of this stems from.
Where do you get that idea?
The issue I’ve seen with these lowest levels of governance is pettiness. Why did so and so get a break and not me five years ago? I don’t like plants why do we need a watering system? I’m allergic to mosquito foggers, can people just stay in at night, etc., etc.
This sounds really efficient actually compared to the alternative in many developed countries where new houses simply do not get built at all after spending a lot of money on admin fees for nothing.
"Nuance gets lost" well with centralized politics, the whole damn point gets lost.
> People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.
A point that comes up over and over again when discussing HOA's. See the recent submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144005
You still have "democracy"/governance there in your neighborhood in Costa Rica.
> People complain about governments being slow
You're literally describing a government
[flagged]
Payola
Yep, this. Consensus isn't as powerful as cash and favors.