[forensic]

Thanks for your comment. One thing I take away from what you said is that the solution to problems like this is BETTER government, not ZERO government.

All the libertarians want to use any government problem as an excuse to just scrap the whole government. But you make it clear that the problem is not ALL government, the problem is BAD government, and government CAN be improved.

[Anechoic]

Yes, I would choose "better government" over "zero government" (although the libertarian response would be "we're not calling for no government, just minimal government). That said - I don't really see the path to "better" government. We have so many competing interests, even at the city level, that it's very difficult to develop reasonable regulations that are effective yet fair. That's one of the big problems with environmental regulations and the public process.

One response would be to push as much of the decision-making process as possible down to the local level, but that creates its own problem, as well as inefficiencies.

Obviously, it's a hard problem; if it wasn't, it would have been solved by now.

[eli_gottlieb]

There is no way to get zero government for urban issues. Urban living naturally means an overlap between private property rights, public commons, and governmental infrastructure efforts.

The question is whether you have a democratically-run municipal or regional/county government with the power to make urban-planning decisions, or whether you instead resolve everything through a tangled network of property-rights lawsuits.