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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

Is it actually morally correct? Philosophically, this ends up with the ideal government being every single person determining their own rules, doesn't it? The ideal state of things would be to reject democracy and move to libertarianism? I'd argue that such a society does not function, and having a functional society is also a moral good.

On a more practical note, the Alberta government is currently actively meddling in municipal politics and policies, so in the currently discussed application it seems more of a "I want to have a government that's as large as possible that I can still have power over".

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No, it's fine for governments to fix externalities. I just believe they should do it at low levels.

I don't support Alberta meddling in local politics. I don't support the US federal or state governments doing this. If cities or neighborhoods want to come together and say "we want a blue community in this red state" or vice versa that's a just form of self-governance.

I actually believe this is how we make democracy work better. It has scale problems but remains the least-bad form of government so we should work to design systems that make it function well.

Letting people self-assort to live with others with their values under rules that reflect those within reason is good.

How do you address issues where tragedy of the commons comes into play? Every individual neighbourhood/smallest unit of government would (rightly) pick the best option for themselves.

Having a large representative base is the easiest way to prevent that.

Can you give me examples of situations like this?

I am perfectly fine with something like the clean air and water acts (in principle if not implementation). Obviously people in an upstream town aren't allowed to dump pollution in the river to save money.

But why would the upstream town be interested in governing what they dump?

Clearly someone/something has to assert the value that downstream towns have the right to unpolluted water. And won't that be the higher level government preventing the upstream town from asserting their rules and values?

Yes actually. I'm not opposed to any government above a highly-local level. The point of government is basically to fix externalities and run defense/diplomacy. For rivers we do in fact need co-ordinated governance to prevent people from polluting others' water downstream.

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