Customer Reviews

The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society (Economics, Cognition, and Society)

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You're not the only one that wonders whether the government that is supposed to guarantee your private property rights seems more interested in making sure your vinyl siding runs the same way as your neighbor's. This is the way of things in America today, where municipal governments segregate business from housing, then wonder why everyone thinks he has to own a car.

Enter the Voluntary City, a cogent and realistic analysis of how we got here, and whether we have actually improved things in doing it. There used to be sufficient housing (try to find the word "homeless" before the Carter presidency), and police that actually had to catch the bad guys (read about one police force that had a catch rate of over 90%), and the reasonable expectation that if you wanted to alter your property you could do so without groveling to the city fathers. We gave these things up in the hope that what we would get back would be better. But is it? Really?

You aren't the only one that wonders. This excellent book provides some answers to the question, and the impetus to take those answers out into the political world. We're doing it where I am.

Back in the mid to late 90's I had the pleasure of reading a new version of a book written by David Friedman called "The Machinery of Freedom" which was originally published in the 1970's. Prior to this review I had the opportunity to read the libertarian classic "The Market for Freedom" written by Morris and Linda Tannehill was one of the first books to introduce the concepts of a voluntary society in print.

While I am not sold on anarcho-capitalism, Friedman's book introduced me to anarcho-capitalist ideas and now, years later, thanks to David T. Beito and the Independent Institute, "The Voluntary City" is published that confirms many of the thoughts and ideas Friedman and the Tanehills wrote about in their treatises.

This book is a collection of policy pieces done by different authors that detail specific, present and past real-life examples of free market alternatives to things like court systems and litigation, education, police, housing and welfare. Most of whom were provided by insurance plans people purchased or services provided by private, charitable organizations people belonged to while governments, by and large, stayed out of the way.

One aspect of the book that was not pointed out was private fire departments. Despite them being provided by municipalities, to this day most fire departments in the U.S. are staffed almost entirely by volunteers. Prior to being run by governments, many fire departments were privately provided in which their funding came from insurance plans they particpated in that provided fire protection for their customers. It wasn't until after the civil war that municipalities started acquiring, starting and operating them.

Even today, governments are beginning to privatize many essential services since they have become too costly to run.

For example Arizona-based Rural Metro Corporation has contracts with cities and counties across the country to provide fire and ambulatory services for municipalities that will not or cannot afford to provide them.

Despite this one subject left out, I felt this book was very well done and I heartily recommend it to people who have doubts about private alternatives to government services or to those who are looking for new, radical ideas to replace the monopolies governments have on services they presently provide.

RE an earlier reviewer's example of volunteer fire departments... one of the reasons that cities professionalized their fire departments is that the volunteers were not always so helpful - they were paid by the value of what they saved, so competing teams would show up at the same fire, and end up fighting with each other for the prize while the building burned. Or they simply wouldn't bother with low-value fires. Firehouses of the period are interesting, culturally - kind of a men's clubhouse - precursor to fraternal lodges.