[nologic01]

The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state (and even more abstractly, the human collective comprising other nations etc).

Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.

[dragonwriter]

> The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state

So does this nation-state have democratically-adopted rules directing the city to act differently on housing? If not, how is this claim relevant to the comment about how democracy is supposed to work?

[nologic01]

Landed gentry owning the political process reminds of feudalism, not democracy.

[Joker_vD]

No, that's exactly how democracy worked in e.g. Athens. Or how republic worked in e.g. Rome. But then again, wealthy people pretty much always owned the political process.

Plus, of course, there is a bunch of people who understand "democracy" to be simply "the rule of the democrats" :)

[Nasrudith]

And the converse - if you own the political process then why aren't you wealthy? In an ideal system the answer would be "because 1/Nth of the power isn't worth much", but there in practice are always power bottlenecks that give disproportionate sway.

Even assuming a given ruling actor is principled and incorruptible, an archetypal "good king", there would be many other aspirants who want to replace them by means fair or foul. Large piles of money just lying around have always been an attractive nuisance for thieves.

[anon84873628]

Because the nation-state is constantly using the democratic process to decide which powers should be delegated to which part of the hierarchy.

This thread is about that abstract process, and indeed whether "housing crisis" is enough justification to start overriding local autonomy.

For example, in California the state government recently restricted the power of local governments to regulate ADU construction. This was a case of state democracy overriding local decisions because of their negative externalities when taken in aggregate.

Basically the whole point of a government hierarchy is to resolve the multi-agent coordination problems that routinely occur. The government is the equivalent of the mob boss in the prisoner's dilemma, and without it we will devolve into a tragedy of the commons.