Do you want to live next to the guy who either cannot or is unwilling to pay? Nobody else does either.

I was surprised that taxes cover garbage pickup in some cities. I'm in Portland, Oregon and private collectors are assigned to various parts of the city with regulated fees. You choose your can size, frequency, etc. and pay the collector.

In St Paul, MN, we have private trash collection. This results in one or two garbage trucks coming down every street, every single day. The wear on the streets, and especially the alleyways, is incredible. They have to repave them every other year. But we can't have municipal trash collection because "free market" or some crap. Ugh.

And that's why the government puts them in jail.

Seems harsh actually.

In many cities there are assistance programs for the elderly, etc. who are truly broke but fines do work well for negligent landlords, fallow properties, etc.

I assume they give warnings first.

Right, but the punishment for not paying taxes is a lot harsher than seems reasonable for someone who just doesn't pay their garbage-pickup bill. It feels weird for those to be the same thing.

I'm gonna guess it'll be treated much like water bills (when the city owns the water processing, anyway). Threaten to call the health authority and child protective services if you don't pay the bill (after all, living in a home full of waste is a health hazard). Put liens on your house and/or car, eventually taking you to court and possibly garnishing your wages. In the meantime, no water service and they'll probably alert other utilities to your lack of payment so you'll either not get turned on or have to pay a deposit.

Then why not live somewhere else?

In theory perhaps, but every explanation I've heard for how such a society would work has so many holes that they only work for a small subset of real-life cases, and wouldn't scale at all.

I'm sure it would work great for a small community of up to a couple of hundred carefully selected individuals, but I think anyone who thinks it would work for general society is a bit blinded by their ideology.

In the end, the only forms of Government that have worked at scale have centralised governance, and democratic Governments seem to be the least-worst workable systems.

Not really, no. These things work at scale, and it would be incredibly difficult to find a price that works for everyone without it also taking into account their income, or similar. So... a tax.

Governments are a default state produced by groups of humans. They are inevitable. Making them better is incredibly hard work, but that is the only option.

Often times, they are improved by working outside the system itself, it seems. So there are some interesting options for tackling this hard problem. The company mentioned in the article may turn out to be a great example of this.

Governments do come in many forms, with varying size, composition, and effectiveness. However, the ancap vision of no government and everything done by "voluntary" contract has no meaningful basis in reality at this point, as far as I can tell.

I agree with you re. anarcho-capitalism. I think that a state is a prerequisite for capitalism.

But that doesn't mean you couldn't a) pare back the state to the bare minimum functionality (which doesn't include garbage collection, IMO) and fund it voluntarily.

> But that doesn't mean you couldn't a) pare back the state to the bare minimum functionality (which doesn't include garbage collection, IMO) and fund it voluntarily.

You could do that with the entity called “the state”, but that entity would no longer be the state or government, no matter what it was called. (It might be an arm of the real government, which might consist of entities voluntarily funding the “state” which themselves exercise coercive, in practice, extraction of wealth, or it might be an irrelevant figurehead.)

>However, the ancap vision of no government and everything done by "voluntary" contract has no meaningful basis in reality at this point

What about tribal societies?

I'm talking about larger groups of humans. Things are very different when you have only a few hundred humans or less. Dunbar's number[1] is an important factor here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Don't most people only have real social relationships with a few hundred people or less?

Of course, but I'm not sure what that has to do with governance structures of societies.

Too late to edit, so posting a follow-up for clarification: I don't mean anarcho-capitalism, I mean a voluntarily-funded State.

As an anarcho-capitalist, I'd be really keen on a "HumbleBundle" type government funding model. E.g. you don't get to pick if you pay taxes, but you do get to pick which parts of the state get what proportion of your taxes. E.g. 30% welfare, 0% military, 70% infrastructure development.

You could even argue that such an arrangement is voluntary in a narrow definition of a term. Definitely not one to satisfy most libertarians/anarcho-capitalists, but good enough for us to say we're not living in a state where we have absolutely no power over the state's spending.

How does that resolve? If I pay 0% to the military, but the US gets a favorable trade deal b/c theyre worried for invasion, do I get the reward without any skin in the game?

Wouldn't a savvy gamesman just vote for their own self-interest?

Perhaps that could be a feature? Everyone voting not just for their own self-interest, but for the things they think are important government features. Over the entire populace, it'll average out and their gaming won't amount to much.

The idea is that it's more "expressive" than one person = one vote. And it's more manageable than pure direct-democracy. Look, you could fiddle with things and have "minimum" amounts so that people can't completely break a government feature if they don't like it. E.g. 100% of people voting to have 0 military spending. But, if that were to happen, is that not a hint to politicians that none of the voting populace wants military spending?

To me it's another way to give more power to the individuals, rather than leaving it solely in the grasp of politicians.

Do you think it's desirable to give more power to individuals? Personally, I think enlightened despotism is probably the best form of government in terms of fairness, efficiency, etc.

In the US (a democratic republic), I see that the decision makers act in their own short term self-interest.

The risk with an enlightened despot (think typical corporate structure) is that the person at the top can really cause damage, because they don't have checks on what they can do. We can imagine the downside right now -- the strength of the republic is currently being stress tested to see if it can salvage itself simply by resistance, friction, and inefficiency to prevent Mr. Trump from destroying so much.

Throw in sortition instead of voting, and I'd be volunteering to hand out leaflets :)

Supposing I would be willing to fund a state; what happens when my neighbor doesn't, while still receiving all the benefits of law & order?

Basically, this is just setting up a giant tragedy-of-the-commons situation.

No, it wouldn't, because that's the fantasy that libertarians always push that has no historical or contemporary basis for working as a society.

Sorry for being grumpy, but this is as useful a contribution as "Wouldn't it be better if we harnessed the power of house-elves to magic away our trash?"

... except that the vast majority of what society does is voluntary.

To extend your analogy: "The magic house-elves are already making our cars, writing our software, and growing our food. I wonder if we should pay them a bit more to cart away our trash too."

The house-elves shouldn't be doing the law enforcement or the Government (and in fact they _are_ right now, e.g. in the case of for-profit prisons and the Fed, and it's a disaster). But they're a bit under-utilised right now in some areas :)