¡Ya Basta!

I like cities and think that if they were designed right (green roofs everywhere, priority to bikes and pedestrians over cars, community gardens) they could serve as excellent habitats. I also like country life, with wide open spaces, and less hassle from authority. I don’t think there’s any one solution or any one way that people should live; with the right mindset and clean technology cities, small towns, and (maybe) even suburbs could work. Less government intrusion and oligarchical domination would make every living arrangement better. In his essay, “Big Cities; Living Proof that ‘Growth is Not Good’” Mike Folkerth makes some good points, but I think he fails to see that small town solutions could also work in cities.

For many years I called the Alaska Village of Talkeetna home and made critical observations of the benefits of living in a small town.

To begin with, we had no government presence. I know, we should have all died within a week, but we didn’t. We had no police force. “Oh my, who protected you?” Let me just say that mugging in Talkeetna would have been a poor career choice.

We had a volunteer “unpaid” fire department. Sure, the motto for the Talkeetna Volunteer Fire Department was, “We haven’t lost a foundation yet,” but it served us well.

If you can possibly get your mind around it, consider the cost savings to the citizens of Talkeetna by not employing government and a police force! And if you really want to allow your thinking to go buck wild, imagine the freedoms that we enjoyed from this self ruling arrangement.

When we wanted a park in Talkeetna, we built one. And no, we didn’t apply for a dang grant. It was our park, why should someone else be asked to pay for it? When a neighbor had a fire, we helped them rebuild. When someone was stalled along the road, we stopped to give assistance. In other words, we had a community that functioned properly.

I know what many are thinking, “We couldn’t possibly get along without large government and an immediate police presence.” And, certainly those living in large cities can’t; which is my point.

Humans are in fact tribal animals and when the tribes become too large our society begins to break down as it has in every city in the United States. When groups become too large to manage, we tend to hand the management of our lives over to strangers and no one is stranger than Congress. Large government is merely a product of large cities.

I think he’s absolutely right about group size and social ills. Big groups can’t communicate effectively and so can’t function effectively. But I also think the group size at which these problems begin is larger than Mike thinks. New York is perceived as a dysfunctional hell hole to many country folk, but to those like Jane Jacobs it’s a flourishing ecosystem. The diversity of the City and the endless possibility of the City create a magic that small town living can’t duplicate. There is something incredible that happens along with all the somethings terrible when large eclectic groups get together.

Even if we reduced federal power and moved to local governance, the monied corporate elite are too strong and would dominate the small governments. That’s bullshit. The problem now is that we’ve constructed a vast, oppresive legal code that empowers the organization over the individual. Corporations are the monsters they are today because a court ruling granted them 4th Amendment rights. That’s crazy. People are people, organizations are pragmatic mental constructs we use to accomplish goals. Organizations are relationships, and in all things the individual must be protected from the group. If we rolled back all the laws that grant privileges to the elite and their corporate clubs we’d be fine. Devolution is the solution. Liberty is the goal. We are the Liberty Movement. We stand for Life, Liberty, and Mutual Aid. Death to the New World Order.