For governance, ‘one size fits all’ is a bad idea — even if the ‘one size’ is your version of freedom

By David McElroy · May 23, 2011

Different people want different things. We accept that in most areas of life, so why can’t we accept that the same thing is true for how the places we live are managed?

I like steak, pizza and chicken. I don’t care for seafood, Chinese food or most veggies. (Don’t mention that last part to my doctor.) I would be rather unhappy in a world where the majority voted to adopt seafood and Chinese for all the restaurants. I would be happy if none of the restaurants served what I don’t like, but many other people wouldn’t be. Fortunately, it’s not an either/or situation. I have the places I like. They have the places they like. We can change our minds and move back and forth between restaurants.

So if this competitive model is good for restaurants — and cars and computers and pretty much everything the free market provides — why do most people tend to favor “one true way” for governing territory?

It’s easy to point fingers at statists of various stripes and feel that libertarians aren’t afflicted by this same “one size fits all” disease, but I think many people still are. When libertarians talk about establishing a free country, they generally have in mind a world where people are free to do what they want, but there are limited local governments to take care of basic services. It occurs to me that it’s no more moral to impose our “one size fits all” model than it is for anyone else to.

When I first started considering libertarian ideas (something like 20 years ago), I was one of those who envisioned imposing our version of a free society on everyone. Now, though, I’m much more interested in multiple, competing models of governance. As long as people had the right to move freely between the models, it would be up to them how they chose to live.

Some anarchists want to live in a society with no real rules — just the understanding that you do your thing on your property and I’ll do mine on my property. They don’t want rules about what can be done and what can be built and what businesses can go where, similar to what’s developed on the street in the picture at the right. They envision a world that would seem like chaos to many people. There’s nothing wrong with their vision, but it’s only one of many models.

Some people want a society that’s much more like the one in the early days of this country, when small governments provided basic services and left us alone otherwise. Other people want a society that’s much more organized and structured, where it’s managed like a gated community or a giant Disney theme park in order to provide the most sanitized and safe and entertaining environment possible.

There are a dozen models that we could quickly list and there are many more that I haven’t even thought of. Some might be socialist. Some might be based on religious principles of various sorts. Many of them would be nutty and wouldn’t work. But there’s no reason for people not to have the freedom to try them all.

I believe the days of the nation-state are coming to an end. In the chaos that’s going to come about because of some of the social, political and economic collapse that I foresee, there are going to be opportunities to experiment with new models of governance. We need to be prepared for whatever it is we want to start, even if we can’t agree on what we want.

Think of them as business startups. Many people have ideas for businesses. Some of those ideas will get investment funding and start up. Some of those will be successful and compete for customers. Why can’t it be the same way for governing territory?

I’ve been thinking about these issues for about 15 years, but I’m only now discovering that others are thinking the same things. If you want a good starting place, I suggest the terrific site called Let A Thousand Nations Bloom. Another site that came to my attention last week is for a non-profit that is trying to improve life around the world through entrepreneurial change, but the people at Openworld seem to be very much in favor of personal freedom. If you have suggestions for other sources of information about this, please leave them in the comments. (I’ve gotten so much good information lately that I’m having trouble remembering what all of it is, so don’t be shy about repeating a good source that I should already know.) I have a lot to learn, so I’m interested in what you already know about this. I’ve been told about at least one website coming that’s going to deal with competitive governance, so I’ll certainly be linking to that one when it’s online. In addition, the item I did last week about “free cities” is also applicable to this, so check the links there.

Also, I’m curious which model of society you’d like to live in. Personally, I’m interested in a very structured society that might have more in common with Disney World than with a typical anarchist paradise. (The picture at right is of a tree-lined street in the Birmingham-area planned community of Mount Laurel, which is one such small example that I love.) I wouldn’t mind running a successful company that owns and operates such a city — for a profit. What are you interested in pursuing, either as a place to live or as a business or non-profit startup for yourself?

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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