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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

To this list I would add: San Mateo county, California. I live there. Our house is located in a valley below street grade and so we have a sewage ejector pump. That pump is maintained by the county. In the ~15 years we have lived here it has failed twice. Both times we called the county and a crew came out to fix it without an hour. Both times we had to pay nothing. It was, quite literally, our tax dollars at work.

This is the thing that drive me batshit crazy about the libertarian tech bros who live here. They appear to be willfully ignorant of the fact that the reason quality of life here is so high is not because we have no government, but because we have competent government that quietly and without fanfare just takes care of business behind the scenes so that the tech bros can do their thing without having to worry about fixing their sewage ejector pumps.

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That's more a question of having competent plumbers available on demand. The infrastructure behind those plumbers (funding, training, organization) can be achieved many different ways. So it is with most things. Roads, healthcare etc. At the end of the day, someone provides the service and it's organised somehow. But there are many possible ways to set it up.

> there are many possible ways to set it up.

And all of them require competent government.

To which I would add: different ways of setting it up have different consequences. The fact that this service is both reliable and free means that I have no incentive not to get my pump fixed when it fails, which makes it less likely that a failed pump will go unrepaired and leak raw sewage into the creek behind my house.

(This is one of the (many) things that I never see libertarians address: how do you deal with externalities?)

Oh for sure, there needs to be a central authority to look after the commons. It's whoever controls that area, be it the federal/state/local government, or more traditionally the local lord or the king or whoever.

I'm in a rural area with water provided by a private organization. Any issue is generally resolved within an hour or two.

There are some policies and government functions that are not that expensive and have a huge return on investment for society.

It’s when there’s either no government or a huge government that you run into problems.

i mean, San Mateo is like one of the richest counties in America - i'd hope they would be able to do basic things like what you stated.

You have to ask which way the causality runs. Is SMC government good because SMC is full of rich people, or is SMC full of rich people because it has good government, which attracts rich people to move there? Or is it both working in a virtuous cycle?

it probably is a bit of a virtuous cycle but i'd argue that richer people generally demand more accountability and have more power to enact change from their local government than poor people - whether this is due to richer people being better educated, or having more free time to think about local politics, or a sense of entitlement for getting more out of society etc... i think they all play a part in being engaged in local politics and having agency to effect change.

Well, the US are one of the richest countries in the world - so it's a bit mind-boggling that most cities (apparently) have problems providing basic services...

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