Gongol.com Archives: November 2024
November 27, 2024
A small town in Kentucky has voted to disband itself. By a slim margin, a tax revolt has overturned the status quo. ■ Then-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney took a lot of hassle for saying, "Corporations are people" during a speech in 2011. If he'd only said, "Corporations are made up of people", then his point would have been clearer -- and irrefutable. Corporations are indeed very little without the people who form them. ■ It's no small matter that cities are corporations, and thus they are, in turn, largely made up of the people who live within them. Had Romney said something like, "Cities are people", then it's likely that many of his detractors would have charitably welcomed him making the point. ■ As corporations, cities exist mainly to offer economies of scale in delivering important services: Police, fire, rescue, water, streets, sewers, drainage, and parks. Some offer their own utility services, some manage the local schools, and some even run opera houses and run television stations. But the main purpose of the city as a legal entity is to take care of a lot of necessary chores in order to make it easier for settlements of people to live together in clean, safe, and economical ways. ■ Obliterating a city government doesn't obliterate the needs managed by the city. It just makes them harder to perform. Even in the case of little Bonnieville, the county will have to take over for some of the same administrative chores that had been the work of the city before. Others, like keeping the street lights on, will be abandoned. ■ The local power company has suggested that individual households could pick up the tab if they wanted to keep the streetlights on. And therein lies the heart of the matter: Residents might still be able to obtain most of the services they had before by paying for them a la carte. But it's pretty hard to get the same bundle of services one piece at a time for the same price as a municipal corporation can furnish by offering a one-stop shop. Taxes are never popular, but few people really give fair consideration to the deals they're getting close to home.
