Category: reason

The Coronavirus Debate Was Bernie Sanders’ Last Chance. He Blew It.

Last night’s Democratic debate was possibly the last chance for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) to turn the tables against former Vice President Joe Biden, the frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination. But his plan to wholly transform vast sections of the U.S. economy seems unlikely to be particularly attractive to the public right now, given the country’s current sense of dread.

The coronavirus pandemic loomed large over the proceedings: Biden and Sanders bumped elbows in lieu of shaking hands, stood at podiums that were several feet apart, and delivered their remarks to an empty audience (a dramatic improvement: thank you, social distancing). Moderators Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and Ilia Calderon began by asking the candidates how they would deal with the crisis, and Biden attempted to reassure viewers that he would harness the full reach of the federal government to confront COVID-19.

“We need to act swiftly and very thoroughly, and in concert with all the forces we need to bring to bear to confront this crisis now,” said Biden.

Sanders vowed the same but tried to pivot to his usual talking points: transformational economic change, Medicare for All, etc.

“Let’s be honest and understand that this coronavirus pandemic exposes the incredible weakness and dysfunction of our current health care system,” said Sanders. “We are the only major country on Earth not to guarantee health care to all people. We’re spending so much money and yet we are not even prepared for this pandemic.”

Biden countered that Italy has a single-payer health care system and this hasn’t helped the country deal with coronavirus. “It doesn’t work there,” said Biden.

When asked how to address the economic impact of the crisis, Sanders brought up income inequality:

We have more income and wealth inequality in America today than any time in 100 years. And what that means that in the midst of this crisis, you know, if you’re a multimillionaire, no one is happy about this crisis, you’re going to get through it. You’re going to get everything you need. You’re not worried about health care. You’re not worried about income coming in.

Half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck. We’ve got people who are struggling working two or three jobs to put food on the table. What is going to happen to them? So the lesson to be learned is we have got to move aggressively right now to address the economic crisis as a result of…the coronavirus, what we have got to do also is understand the fragility of the economy and how unjust and unfair it is that so few have so much and so many have so little.

Sanders also stated that the U.S. government’s job “is to tell every working person, no matter what your income is, you are not going to suffer as a result of this crisis.” This is of course an impossible promise—even if the government took strong action to bail out various sectors of the economy, forgive some debts, or pay people who can’t work right now, many Americans would still suffer adverse economic outcomes due to the virus.

When the debate finally turned to other matters, Sanders hammered Biden more successfully by bringing up the frontrunner’s long history of bad Senate votes: on the Defense of Marriage Act, the Iraq War, etc. He was definitely a bit sharper and more focused than Biden throughout. But at this time of national crisis, Biden’s comparatively comforting message seems like the better sell—or at least, more than adequate to maintain his decisive lead.

Read a full transcript of the debate here.

FREE MINDS

Economist Tyler Cowen highlights a list of proposals for funding coronavirus research on his Marginal Revolution blog:

This is (by far) the best document I have seen on what to do on the medical side.  It is about 3 pp. long and I believe it will be updated periodically.  Excerpt:

  • Consider guaranteeing top tier treatment and ICU beds for people directly working on treatments or vaccines. We need to keep relevant science labs open. (They’re likely to be closed as things stand.) No doubt logistically challenging but may be necessary. Can you get scientists to keep going without this?
  • Announce $10B prizes for first vaccine and for first cure. Think about mechanics. Should there be awards for second place, too? How should collaboration be factored in?
  • Issue $1B of research grants to all competent labs and organizations that could plausibly use them. They just have to report on progress every 30 days and require that they actively share all progress with other labs.
  • Proposed structure: $100M to each of 5 companies.

Check out the rest of the post here.

FREE MARKETS

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been a significant obstacle in slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Massachusetts General Hospital President Peter Slavin reminded Meet the Press viewers of this yesterday when host Chuck Todd thunderously demanded that Slavin explain why it had taken so long for “private facilities and university facilities” to provide COVID-19 testing.

“Well it was just the day before yesterday that we got regulatory relief from the FDA so that we didn’t need to jump through all sorts of hoops,” Slavin responded.

The best thing federal regulatory agencies can do to stop coronavirus right now is to speedily step out of the way. No libertarians in a pandemic? Nonsense.

QUICK HITS

  • More debate news: Biden promised to pick a woman to be his vice presidential candidate. Sanders said that he would “in all likelihood” pick a woman as well.
  • The Centers for Disease Control has recommended that all events including more than 50 people be canceled for at least eight weeks. This has plenty of people wondering whether Tuesday’s primaries should proceed as planned.
  • State and local governments are instructing restaurants to shut down. New York City has ordered all establishments to close, and D.C. is implementing strict occupancy limits.
  • Andrew Gillum, a former Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, announced he would enter rehab after being caught in an embarrassing incident over the weekend.
  • Missing sports? I’ve got you covered:

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Adjudication Outside Article III (part one)

This has nothing to do with COVID-19, but maybe for some readers that will be a relief.

Last week I published an article, Adjudication Outside Article III, that attempts to solve a very longstanding constitutional puzzle. I posted about the paper here almost two years ago, but now that the final version is finally out I thought I’d spend a few posts laying out my solution to the puzzle.

The standard version of the puzzle is this: Article III of the Constitution says that the judicial power of the United States is vested in the federal courts, whose judges have tenure during good behavior and can’t have their salaries reduced. It also describes the kinds of cases (such as those involving parties from different states, or arising under federal law) that those federal courts can hear.

But from the Founding to today, we have always allowed other bodies to adjudicate those same kinds of cases too. The most obvious example is state courts, which can and do hear cases involving diverse parties or federal questions, even though most state judges lack life tenure. But putting those aside, we have had non-Article-III territorial courts, administrative bodies like land claims courts, military tribunals, and so on.

So what explains these exceptions, and what other exceptions can Congress make, if it wants to keep things away from those pesky life-tenured judges? This is the longstanding puzzle, which has generally produced three attempted solutions. Some people say “basically none,” and argue that even some of these exceptions (like territorial courts) are unconstitutional. Other people say “basically whatever Congress thinks is a good idea,” and argue that there. And a few people have tried to come up with some kind of middle positions (for instance, that there must be Article III review), but in my view these have not been successful.

My article proposes a different way of thinking about the problem. It argues that it is a mistake to focus on the act of adjudication itself; adversary presentation about the application of law to fact is simply a procedure, and not a procedure uniquely limited to Article III courts. Instead, the constitutional question is one of government power. What kind of power has the tribunal been vested with, and what is it trying to do with that power?

In particular, some tribunals exercise judicial power. The federal courts are an example, but they are not the only example. State courts and territorial courts are also examples, and I can explain why these are not exceptions to the text of Article III.

Some tribunals exercise executive power. They have nothing to do with Article III. But because of the principles reflected by the due process clause, they cannot authorize the deprivation of life, liberty, or property outside some very narrow circumstances.

Some tribunals exercise no power at all. They can act only where they have the consent of the litigants or act to advise another institution.

In a few more posts later this week, I’ll give examples of what I mean, and a few implications for all of the non-Article-III adjudicators out there, like administrative agencies, magistrate judges, and bankruptcy judges.

Or if you want 71 pages of this (with 481 footnotes), you can always read the whole article…

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Price-Gouging Laws Will Do More Harm Than Good During the Coronavirus Pandemic

In response to surging prices for items that Americans are snapping up to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians themselves are peddling policies that will prove expensive for the people they’re ostensibly supposed to help.

For instance, New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman (D-Manhattan) wants to punish “price gouging,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has asked state residents to rat-out vendors who charge what their goods are worth, and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is fretting over his powerlessness to prosecute suppliers who respond to market demand. It’s all framed in cuddly language about protecting the public, but that’s exactly who such government intrusions hurt.

The first problem is that, for as common as accusations of “price gouging” are, the term has no fixed meaning. Asked when rising prices cross the line to become criminal, New York Attorney General Letitia James told NPR, “there’s no definitive answer to that question, but you know it when you see it.”

Vagueness is the order of the day for many states. Some—including Alabama, Florida, and Maine—forbid selling at an “unconscionable” price. Idaho and Texas ban sales at an “exorbitant or excessive price.” And New York splits the difference with restrictions on “unconscionably excessive price” increases during an emergency, according to FindLaw. New York’s Sen. Hoylman would “establish that an ‘unconscionable excessive price’ is a price greater than 10% higher than before a public health emergency began” (because that’s as good a number as any, I guess, and the definition already used in neighboring New Jersey).

As you might imagine, there are problems inherent in pulling numbers and words out of the ether to mandate a legally permissible price for goods that are flying off the shelves because of rising demand, restricted supply, or both.

“Among economists, price gouging … simply reflects the emotional response non-economists have to rapid price increases,” write Antony Davies, associate professor of economics at Duquesne University and James Harrigan, managing director of the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona, in a recent column. “What politicians and other anti-price gouging proponents would have you believe is that we can have what we want, at the price we want, simply by passing a law.”

Laws can’t change the market conditions that drive prices up. Prices for hand sanitizer, face masks, and easily stored food are rising right now not because sellers are mean, but because demand is rising relative to the immediately available supply.

Those rising prices tell consumers that what they want is now more valuable than before and should probably be used more sparingly or be replaced by something else, if possible. It also tells manufacturers and distributors that they should increase production, and where they should send the goods—if they’re allowed to.

“The higher the price of hand sanitizer rises, the more incentive entrepreneurs have to divert shipments from where they are needed less to where they are needed more,” Davies and Harrigan add. “The higher the price of surgical masks, the more incentive manufacturers have to work around the clock to make more, and to feed them into the supply lines.”

Sure enough, GOJO industries is “operating around the clock” to produce hand sanitizer, 3M has “ramped up production” of respirators, and many other companies are responding to the messages they’re getting from the market. Allowed time, goods will get to where they’re needed, and prices will drop as supply meets demand.

But if Hoylman’s bill passes, prices for hand sanitizer won’t be allowed to rise more than 10 percent in New York even as they match the market rate in Arizona, which has no price controls. That sends a strong signal to distributors to ship the available supply to the Grand Canyon State rather than the Empire State. It also distorts incentives to manufacturers that could make more hand sanitizer or newly enter the market to meet surging demand.

Well, anti-gouging price caps don’t entirely block market signals; black markets inevitably arise to meet demand. But illegal deals hidden from public view aren’t as effective as open markets at signaling to manufacturers and distributors.

“A fact always missed by proponents of price caps is that black-market prices are higher than the unregulated market prices would be,” commented Donald J. Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University, in 2005. “The reason is that unregulated market prices—being visible and legal—will stimulate a larger inflow of supplies than will black-market prices.”

In some cases, anti-price gouging efforts actively separate buyers from sellers lest somebody agree to pay an “unconscionable” price.

“Companies, pressured by growing criticism from regulators and customers, cracked down” on so-called price gouging by vendors selling much-sought products to customers preparing for the pandemic, The New York Times reported last week. “The attorney general’s offices in California, Washington and New York are all investigating price gouging related to the coronavirus.”

As a result of the pressure, Amazon restricted sales of popular items by third-party vendors, while eBay banned them outright. That left many buyers unable to purchase what they wanted at any price, no matter that sellers have stockpiles of the items waiting to be shipped.

Using the law to drive apart willing buyers and eager sellers is not just counter-productive, it’s immoral. It threatens people with fines and imprisonment if they make mutually agreeable deals that politicians don’t like.

“Price gouging is not inherently coercive, and if it is exploitative at all it is so in a way which makes it difficult to see why it is wrong (or, at least, more wrong than the actions of those who do nothing to help victims of emergencies),” wrote Matt Zwolinski, professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego in a 2008 paper for Business Ethics Quarterly. “Moreover, price gouging can serve morally admirable goals by promoting an efficient allocation of scarce and needed resources, and by creating economic signals which will lead to increases in the supply of needed goods available to desperate populations.”

Which is to say, unless Brad Hoylman, Ken Paxton, and Mark Brnovich are laboring in their basements to crank out face masks to satisfy rising demand, they have no standing for the insults they fling at vendors who actually provide the things to the public. Posturing about what sought-after goods and services should cost in some world of the imagination does nothing in the midst of a crisis to increase their availability.

As economists repeatedly note, rising prices are unpleasant and unpopular, but they aren’t the problem; the real problem is that demand is rising faster than supply. Rising prices cause temporary pain while telling suppliers that more is needed. Price-gouging laws, by contrast, falsely tell the public that politicians are watching out for them even as they extend shortages and the resulting pain.

Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic come and go, but “price-gouging” laws demonstrate that intrusive politicians are a recurring plague.

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Price-Gouging Laws Will Do More Harm Than Good During the Coronavirus Pandemic

In response to surging prices for items that Americans are snapping up to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians themselves are peddling policies that will prove expensive for the people they’re ostensibly supposed to help.

For instance, New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman (D-Manhattan) wants to punish “price gouging,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has asked state residents to rat-out vendors who charge what their goods are worth, and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is fretting over his powerlessness to prosecute suppliers who respond to market demand. It’s all framed in cuddly language about protecting the public, but that’s exactly who such government intrusions hurt.

The first problem is that, for as common as accusations of “price gouging” are, the term has no fixed meaning. Asked when rising prices cross the line to become criminal, New York Attorney General Letitia James told NPR, “there’s no definitive answer to that question, but you know it when you see it.”

Vagueness is the order of the day for many states. Some—including Alabama, Florida, and Maine—forbid selling at an “unconscionable” price. Idaho and Texas ban sales at an “exorbitant or excessive price.” And New York splits the difference with restrictions on “unconscionably excessive price” increases during an emergency, according to FindLaw. New York’s Sen. Hoylman would “establish that an ‘unconscionable excessive price’ is a price greater than 10% higher than before a public health emergency began” (because that’s as good a number as any, I guess, and the definition already used in neighboring New Jersey).

As you might imagine, there are problems inherent in pulling numbers and words out of the ether to mandate a legally permissible price for goods that are flying off the shelves because of rising demand, restricted supply, or both.

“Among economists, price gouging … simply reflects the emotional response non-economists have to rapid price increases,” write Antony Davies, associate professor of economics at Duquesne University and James Harrigan, managing director of the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona, in a recent column. “What politicians and other anti-price gouging proponents would have you believe is that we can have what we want, at the price we want, simply by passing a law.”

Laws can’t change the market conditions that drive prices up. Prices for hand sanitizer, face masks, and easily stored food are rising right now not because sellers are mean, but because demand is rising relative to the immediately available supply.

Those rising prices tell consumers that what they want is now more valuable than before and should probably be used more sparingly or be replaced by something else, if possible. It also tells manufacturers and distributors that they should increase production, and where they should send the goods—if they’re allowed to.

“The higher the price of hand sanitizer rises, the more incentive entrepreneurs have to divert shipments from where they are needed less to where they are needed more,” Davies and Harrigan add. “The higher the price of surgical masks, the more incentive manufacturers have to work around the clock to make more, and to feed them into the supply lines.”

Sure enough, GOJO industries is “operating around the clock” to produce hand sanitizer, 3M has “ramped up production” of respirators, and many other companies are responding to the messages they’re getting from the market. Allowed time, goods will get to where they’re needed, and prices will drop as supply meets demand.

But if Hoylman’s bill passes, prices for hand sanitizer won’t be allowed to rise more than 10 percent in New York even as they match the market rate in Arizona, which has no price controls. That sends a strong signal to distributors to ship the available supply to the Grand Canyon State rather than the Empire State. It also distorts incentives to manufacturers that could make more hand sanitizer or newly enter the market to meet surging demand.

Well, anti-gouging price caps don’t entirely block market signals; black markets inevitably arise to meet demand. But illegal deals hidden from public view aren’t as effective as open markets at signaling to manufacturers and distributors.

“A fact always missed by proponents of price caps is that black-market prices are higher than the unregulated market prices would be,” commented Donald J. Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University, in 2005. “The reason is that unregulated market prices—being visible and legal—will stimulate a larger inflow of supplies than will black-market prices.”

In some cases, anti-price gouging efforts actively separate buyers from sellers lest somebody agree to pay an “unconscionable” price.

“Companies, pressured by growing criticism from regulators and customers, cracked down” on so-called price gouging by vendors selling much-sought products to customers preparing for the pandemic, The New York Times reported last week. “The attorney general’s offices in California, Washington and New York are all investigating price gouging related to the coronavirus.”

As a result of the pressure, Amazon restricted sales of popular items by third-party vendors, while eBay banned them outright. That left many buyers unable to purchase what they wanted at any price, no matter that sellers have stockpiles of the items waiting to be shipped.

Using the law to drive apart willing buyers and eager sellers is not just counter-productive, it’s immoral. It threatens people with fines and imprisonment if they make mutually agreeable deals that politicians don’t like.

“Price gouging is not inherently coercive, and if it is exploitative at all it is so in a way which makes it difficult to see why it is wrong (or, at least, more wrong than the actions of those who do nothing to help victims of emergencies),” wrote Matt Zwolinski, professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego in a 2008 paper for Business Ethics Quarterly. “Moreover, price gouging can serve morally admirable goals by promoting an efficient allocation of scarce and needed resources, and by creating economic signals which will lead to increases in the supply of needed goods available to desperate populations.”

Which is to say, unless Brad Hoylman, Ken Paxton, and Mark Brnovich are laboring in their basements to crank out face masks to satisfy rising demand, they have no standing for the insults they fling at vendors who actually provide the things to the public. Posturing about what sought-after goods and services should cost in some world of the imagination does nothing in the midst of a crisis to increase their availability.

As economists repeatedly note, rising prices are unpleasant and unpopular, but they aren’t the problem; the real problem is that demand is rising faster than supply. Rising prices cause temporary pain while telling suppliers that more is needed. Price-gouging laws, by contrast, falsely tell the public that politicians are watching out for them even as they extend shortages and the resulting pain.

Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic come and go, but “price-gouging” laws demonstrate that intrusive politicians are a recurring plague.

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Dear Dr. Fauci: My neighbors stopped self-isolating and are now stumbling slowly down the street. They’re not practicing social distancing, and not looking very good. What should I do? I am washing my hands often with soap and hot water.

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Dear Dr. Fauci: My neighbors stopped self-isolating and are now stumbling slowly down the street. They’re not practicing social distancing, and not looking very good. What should I do? I am washing my hands often with soap and hot water.

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This Ohio Town Dissolved Itself Over a 1 Percent Tax Increase

When the Ohio village known as Amelia voted to dissolve its government last year, The New York Times seemed bewildered and a little alarmed. The paper acknowledged that it isn’t exactly unprecedented for a municipal regime to shut its doors: Since 2012, it noted, “at least 12 in Ohio alone” have “dissolved or are in the process of doing so.” But it added that these fights usually happen “for financial reasons, often because shrinking populations or reduced state funding make paying for basic services unsustainable.” Amelia was growing, and it wasn’t in particularly dire financial straits. The battle there erupted over what the Times called “a new local tax of just 1 percent.”

That sort of conflict is not especially unusual. In a 2012 paper for The Yale Law Journal, Michelle Wilde Anderson—the same expert who told the Times that cities usually dissolve because of financial problems—lists tax revolts as another recurring reason towns think about disbanding. (Granted, most of the tax-oriented dissolution campaigns that she discusses failed.) And as the Times eventually mentions, the flashpoint in Amelia wasn’t simply a new local income tax; it was the fact that the tax was imposed without public input, along with some plausible complaints that the town was wasting too much of the money it already had. The vote to shutter the government wasn’t close: 68 percent backed the idea.

Anderson’s paper points out that more cities considered dissolving in the first decade of this century than did in the final three decades of the 1900s. Nonetheless, she notes, the press frequently greets a dissolution campaign “as if it were the first in a generation or more, despite the fact that many such changes were being considered across the country at the same time.” Even when the spotlight shines on one of these rebellions, the larger phenomenon somehow seems invisible.

Is that phenomenon something to be happy about? Are we better off with more municipal governments or with fewer?

It depends. Eliminating a government means scraping away a layer of taxes, bureaucracy, and sometimes corruption. But it also means replacing a regime that’s close to home with one that’s more distant and often less accountable. If that just means the county takes over plowing the snow and collecting the trash, it may be a net gain. If it means a new consolidated metropolitan government that’s quick to raise taxes and slow to deliver services, it’s not. There is a long history of top-down efforts to clear away small jurisdictions in favor of allegedly more efficient centralized systems, and even nominally grassroots efforts sometimes get a helping hand from on high. The State of New York, for example, has a Local Government Citizens Reorganization Empowerment Grant Program that encourages and helps fund the process.

In this case, the former Amelians will now be divided between two townships—not exactly a terrible fate. Things look different in villages that lost local control because of encroachment from without rather than a revolt from within. The American landscape is littered with the corpses of towns conquered by larger neighbors. Many of those formerly independent places persist as distinct neighborhoods: Bushwick was a self-governing township before it was absorbed by Brooklyn, which in turn was later swallowed by the City of New York.

Indeed, some communities have incorporated for basically the sole purpose of fending off annexation. While state laws vary, it is generally easier for a city to extend its boundaries into unincorporated land than to absorb an officially recognized town. (The rules for dissolution vary too: States have disparate approaches when it comes to whether a county can veto the process, say, or what happens to a dead city’s debts.)

As far as local services and amenities go, different people have different preferences; the more fluid the system, the easier it is to satisfy that diversity of wants. Ideally, municipalities would function less like mini-states and more like voluntary associations, which constantly split, merge, and dissolve.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the political scientists Elinor and Vincent Ostrom investigated the trend toward consolidating small jurisdictions into centralized regional governments. They concluded that the push was misguided. Local governance, they reported, is better when carried out by “polycentric” systems, in which political units of varying size can cooperate but act independently—operating under a shared set of rules but without a clear hierarchy.

That describes the status quo in much of the country: a patchwork pattern of not just villages and townships and counties but school districts, fire districts, water districts, and other local authorities whose territories do not always match the municipal boundaries, each with a mix of services it provides in-house, services it contracts out to commercial enterprises, services it contracts out to nonprofits, and services it contracts out to other governments. But there are more radical visions of polycentricity as well, with the furthest-reaching resembling the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s vision of a world where social harmony emerges not from submission to a central authority but “by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption.”

Somewhere between Kropotkin and the status quo, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Reiner Eichenberger have called for a meshwork of “functional overlapping competing jurisdictions.” The late Robert Nelson, writing in Reason in 2006, built on their idea to propose a “postmodern political order” in which “the size and functions of local government would be determined by a trial-and-error process of competition. Different institutional forms would contend with one another.” Local governments would come to resemble residents’ associations more than public bureaucracies; municipal bodies would see “a routine flow of mergers, breakups, divestitures, and other organizational rearrangements.”

Put differently: If a neglected neighborhood in Cincinnati wants to become an independent urban village, it should be able to do so as easily as the people of Amelia dissolved their town 20 miles away. And why not? The right of exit is one of the most potent checks on power, and Americans should have more ways to exercise it than just by voting with their feet.

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This Ohio Town Dissolved Itself Over a 1 Percent Tax Increase

When the Ohio village known as Amelia voted to dissolve its government last year, The New York Times seemed bewildered and a little alarmed. The paper acknowledged that it isn’t exactly unprecedented for a municipal regime to shut its doors: Since 2012, it noted, “at least 12 in Ohio alone” have “dissolved or are in the process of doing so.” But it added that these fights usually happen “for financial reasons, often because shrinking populations or reduced state funding make paying for basic services unsustainable.” Amelia was growing, and it wasn’t in particularly dire financial straits. The battle there erupted over what the Times called “a new local tax of just 1 percent.”

That sort of conflict is not especially unusual. In a 2012 paper for The Yale Law Journal, Michelle Wilde Anderson—the same expert who told the Times that cities usually dissolve because of financial problems—lists tax revolts as another recurring reason towns think about disbanding. (Granted, most of the tax-oriented dissolution campaigns that she discusses failed.) And as the Times eventually mentions, the flashpoint in Amelia wasn’t simply a new local income tax; it was the fact that the tax was imposed without public input, along with some plausible complaints that the town was wasting too much of the money it already had. The vote to shutter the government wasn’t close: 68 percent backed the idea.

Anderson’s paper points out that more cities considered dissolving in the first decade of this century than did in the final three decades of the 1900s. Nonetheless, she notes, the press frequently greets a dissolution campaign “as if it were the first in a generation or more, despite the fact that many such changes were being considered across the country at the same time.” Even when the spotlight shines on one of these rebellions, the larger phenomenon somehow seems invisible.

Is that phenomenon something to be happy about? Are we better off with more municipal governments or with fewer?

It depends. Eliminating a government means scraping away a layer of taxes, bureaucracy, and sometimes corruption. But it also means replacing a regime that’s close to home with one that’s more distant and often less accountable. If that just means the county takes over plowing the snow and collecting the trash, it may be a net gain. If it means a new consolidated metropolitan government that’s quick to raise taxes and slow to deliver services, it’s not. There is a long history of top-down efforts to clear away small jurisdictions in favor of allegedly more efficient centralized systems, and even nominally grassroots efforts sometimes get a helping hand from on high. The State of New York, for example, has a Local Government Citizens Reorganization Empowerment Grant Program that encourages and helps fund the process.

In this case, the former Amelians will now be divided between two townships—not exactly a terrible fate. Things look different in villages that lost local control because of encroachment from without rather than a revolt from within. The American landscape is littered with the corpses of towns conquered by larger neighbors. Many of those formerly independent places persist as distinct neighborhoods: Bushwick was a self-governing township before it was absorbed by Brooklyn, which in turn was later swallowed by the City of New York.

Indeed, some communities have incorporated for basically the sole purpose of fending off annexation. While state laws vary, it is generally easier for a city to extend its boundaries into unincorporated land than to absorb an officially recognized town. (The rules for dissolution vary too: States have disparate approaches when it comes to whether a county can veto the process, say, or what happens to a dead city’s debts.)

As far as local services and amenities go, different people have different preferences; the more fluid the system, the easier it is to satisfy that diversity of wants. Ideally, municipalities would function less like mini-states and more like voluntary associations, which constantly split, merge, and dissolve.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the political scientists Elinor and Vincent Ostrom investigated the trend toward consolidating small jurisdictions into centralized regional governments. They concluded that the push was misguided. Local governance, they reported, is better when carried out by “polycentric” systems, in which political units of varying size can cooperate but act independently—operating under a shared set of rules but without a clear hierarchy.

That describes the status quo in much of the country: a patchwork pattern of not just villages and townships and counties but school districts, fire districts, water districts, and other local authorities whose territories do not always match the municipal boundaries, each with a mix of services it provides in-house, services it contracts out to commercial enterprises, services it contracts out to nonprofits, and services it contracts out to other governments. But there are more radical visions of polycentricity as well, with the furthest-reaching resembling the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s vision of a world where social harmony emerges not from submission to a central authority but “by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption.”

Somewhere between Kropotkin and the status quo, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Reiner Eichenberger have called for a meshwork of “functional overlapping competing jurisdictions.” The late Robert Nelson, writing in Reason in 2006, built on their idea to propose a “postmodern political order” in which “the size and functions of local government would be determined by a trial-and-error process of competition. Different institutional forms would contend with one another.” Local governments would come to resemble residents’ associations more than public bureaucracies; municipal bodies would see “a routine flow of mergers, breakups, divestitures, and other organizational rearrangements.”

Put differently: If a neglected neighborhood in Cincinnati wants to become an independent urban village, it should be able to do so as easily as the people of Amelia dissolved their town 20 miles away. And why not? The right of exit is one of the most potent checks on power, and Americans should have more ways to exercise it than just by voting with their feet.

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