Comment by AnthonyMouse

> 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.