Comment by mbesto
10 hours ago
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.
Doesn't the oversight come from the members?
I often read stories on the internet of how dysfunctional American HOAs are, and nobody ever explains why it's like that. HOAs in most other countries seem to work fine. But it sounds like they have too much power and not enough safeguards for democracy (like a quorum).
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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.
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This is literally what American HOAs are becoming.
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.
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!
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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.
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> 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).
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Can AI help here? Asking seriously
There are plenty of other alternatives. Where do you think organized crime came from?
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You're going down a slippery slope... a few more ideas like that and you will be creating... a government.
Yes, a small one, only as large as is necessary to accomplish a limited and enumerated set of objectives...
> 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.
There are two different problems here.
One of them is, you want to have some kind of non-excludable service. But if only 10% of people are contributing then they start to feel resentful and stop contributing, so then only 5% of people are contributing, until no one is contributing at all. So instead you want to have a majority vote and if the majority decides they want it, then everybody pays e.g. $10/month to provide it and you avoid the tragedy of the commons.
This one often has problems, especially if you allow centralization -- then special interests finagle their way into the budget being an onnibus take it or leave it bill where the large majority of what's in wouldn't pass if you put it up for a vote by itself, but nobody wants another government shutdown so now the deficit is two trillion dollars. But this one works pretty okay at the local level.
The other one is, we don't want jack the ripper or for the river to catch on fire. The way this one fails is that instead of prohibiting murder and leaded gasoline, a bunch of busybodies start trying to micromanage everything and pass rules where the marginal cost of administering the rule is larger than the marginal benefit of people following it. Which in turn allows special interests to insert rules that aren't even trying to be net positive and are just a thinly-veiled pretext over suppressing competition or creating demand for a particular industry's services by mandating it, which get easier to hide in the thicket the more unnecessary rules there already are. Which the local governments are even worse at because they're often prohibiting something (like housing construction) where people who can't currently afford to live in (and therefore can't vote in) that locality are the ones who need it.
So those are the two categories: a) spending tax money, b) prohibiting something. But the thing you're describing as being needed there is the first one and the thing people are objecting to with regard to permits and things is the second one.
And the second one has a fairly decent solution, if we would actually implement it: It should be harder to enact a prohibition than repeal it. Things that >80% of people agree should be prohibited stay prohibited, things some busybody or crony managed to have pushed through that one time become easier to get rid of.
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
And they only had to trade away plenty of civil rights for it. What an amazing deal.
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
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I guess it depends where that is. Are you specifically in an community of expats? Guanacaste? I had notably better experience in Uvita/Manuel Antonio.
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.