Municipal Libertarianism

Contents

1. Chapter 1

   Municipalism

   adapted from Murray Bookchin, Municipal Libertarianism Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical…

2. Chapter 2

   Confederalism

   Murray Bookchin Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for face-to-face participatory…

3. Chapter 3

   Confederalism and Interdependence

   Decentralism and self-sustainability must involve a much broader principle of social organization than mere localism.

4. Chapter 4

   Confederalism and State Power

   Above all, I have tried to show in my previous writings how confederation on a municipal basis has existed in sharp…

5. Chapter 5

   Problems of Decentralization

   If many pragmatic people are blind to the importance of decentralism, many in the ecology movement tend to ignore very…

6. Chapter 6

   Toward An Authentic Santa Clara Valley

   The Libertarian Party (US): a political party in the United States that promotes civil liberties, non-interventionism,…

7. Chapter 7

   The Municipality Against the State

   The state was never bureaucracy that grew too large. It was a category of power a town meeting could never legitimately hold in the first place.

   • Statecraft is not politics
   • The town meeting as the model, claimed for the opposite conclusion
   • Confederation instead of representation
   • Dual power, not the ballot or the barricade
   • Rojava: the closest thing to a live trial
   • Where this cuts against our own premises
   • Worth keeping

8. Chapter 8

   The Municipal Trilemma

   Every municipality inherits the same three structural traps regardless of who's on the council — and a fourth problem, the one residents show up angriest about, that no council was ever going to have the authority to fix at all.

   • The fiscal zoning trap
   • The boundary problem
   • The liability inheritance problem
   • The trilemma at street level
   • The flood upstream
   • What actually generalizes

9. Chapter 9

   Transitioning to Private Pickleball

   The Municipal Trilemma found a boundary problem no siting distance could solve. Four exterior boundaries and a membership fee solve the part zoning never could.

   • The part a wall solves that a setback can't
   • Outdoors still works, just not everywhere a town needs it to
   • The synergies a parks department never had a reason to chase
   • A free court is a price, not an absence of one
   • Free isn't a price point. It's a different category entirely.
   • What a membership fee is actually pricing
   • The land underneath it doesn't get a free ride either
   • The cap, revisited

10. Chapter 10

    Government: Wait... I'm Supposed to Be Doing Something About Pickleball

    An institution with an unlimited appetite for one kind of problem and almost none for the other — and the difference has nothing to do with which one actually mattered more.

    • Two kinds of problem, and only one generates a paper trail
    • The fixable problem gets the worse answer
    • What the tree and the tennis court have in common

11. Chapter 11

    Five Centuries Under One Crown

    A live oak that germinated in 1526 is still standing. The tree has outlived every institution that might vote to remove it — until now.

    • What the tree is a unit of
    • The unreachable honest version of the risk
    • Two cultures, and only one gets to call itself safe
    • What actually gets lost

12. Chapter 12

    The Report Was Always Going to Win

    Los Altos hired the arborists who found a hazard, rejected the one who didn't, and gave the tree's own neighbors sixty seconds to say why that should matter.

    • Ancient, or merely very old
    • Why is this about liberty

13. Chapter 13

    The Social Liberty Implications of a Municipal Biodiversity Initiative

    Palo Alto's Parks & Recreation Commission recently stood up a small ad hoc committee to strengthen biodiversity and…

    • The actual claim being made
    • Why this is a social liberty question, not just an ecology one
    • The case for solving it at the ad hoc committee, not the state legislature
    • Where it could go wrong
    • What this has to do with citizens, specifically

14. Chapter 14

    Pro-Housing, Not Pro-Development

    The two get used as if they were the same thing. Housing is a social goal, measured by whether people can live where their lives are. Development is an ideology, measured by how much gets built. A free society can want the first without the second.

    • Use value and exchange value
    • Three claims that seem to collide
    • Where the two part company
    • A test for telling them apart
    • What a pro-housing position looks like
    • Beyond build or block
    • A social goal, not an ideology

15. Chapter 15

    Memory Farms in the Valley of Heart's Delight

    The valley went from orchards to chips largely on its own. The memory farms now arriving are bigger, financed by printed money, and imposed. A social libertarian doesn't ban a business, but has to ask what happens when it decides a place's future.

    • Organic and inorganic growth
    • Planted by incentive
    • Money without limits, development without roots
    • What a social libertarian doesn't oppose
    • Three things that seem to be in tension
    • How to assess community opposition
    • Why the valley is the place to see it clearly
    • Responders, not printers
    • The valley's third crop

16. Chapter 16

    Held in Trust

    Land matters too much to leave to the highest bidder and too much to hand to the state. Land trusts offer a third way: private, voluntary, bound to a purpose, and flexible enough to care for a marsh or a neighborhood.

    • What a land trust is
    • Three claims about land
    • Stewardship that fits the land
    • The cautions
    • Land without the state