He later raised the “tangent” of someone living in his garage or trailer. Dewey Finn raised the possibility that the restriction against indefinite parking might be related to not having people living in trailers. I could imagine using a trailer in the driveway on at least a short term basis to house visitors from out of town a la Eddie from Christmas Vacation.
I also wondered how easy it would be to avoid the 3 days in the manner you describe.
Different cities have different codes. In ours, you can’t park anything that has no means of locomotion on the street. It’s okay to park the trailer if it’s attached to a vehicle (and no blocking line of sight) and it’s okay to park it alone in your driveway.
There are other codes against parking on your front lawn or side lawn. And codes against parking on the street for more than 72 hours.
As for how the city has burdened me, I’ve gotten fixer citations for two things. The first is they periodically (every few years) make our whole block clean up the locked alley behind our houses. It’s annoying, because there are big trees that drop leaves that mulch down into soil. The soil then fills with grass and thistles.
On the other hand, it’s helpful, in that it makes neighbors remove the stacked old tires and broken wood and other stuff that slowly piles up.
The second was a notice to move trash bins. We have a code against leaving trash bins where they can be seen from the street. I called and told them that the bins were behind a fence and the thing they saw was a compost bin. They checked the picture they’d taken and decided that it was okay. If I’d had to move the compost bin, it would have been annoying, but no problem.
Very small potatoes.
Ah, the sunk cost fallacy.
It’s a septic system, so clearly a stunk cost fallacy.
Now that’s a pretty shitty thing to say about folks you’ve never met.
Hopefully they were polite and bid them g b’day,
They’re in the tank for big sewage.
It is about the power certain institutions have over us, their presumed authority and right to compel us to obey. The power to hire and fire and set conditions of work and extract profit in an economy where most of us have to work for someone else, along with the power to fine and imprison—that is, the power of capital and the state—are equally oppressive.
A further comment on the notion of “respect” raised above. There is a big difference between “respect” and “obey.” Corporations and governments don’t care if you “respect” them–they do insist, with violence, that you obey. That is why they are authoritarian and thus illegitimate in any society that wants to be democratic.
On the contrary, without a government you’ll only have democracy until somebody decides they want to pick up a weapon and declare themselves king. No government means no civil rights, and no freedom the moment somebody stronger than you decides to take it away.
Yep.
Absent government you don’t have the (traditional) Libertarian paradise. You have Somalia and their competing warlords. You have all the freedom you have the firepower to enforce. Which for nearly everyone means “none” and “none”.
Can you think of no contemporary or historical examples in between or beyond “Somalia” and “what we’ve got here and now?” Is Somalia an example of what happens when imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism–all backed by governments–destroy local economies and societies, rather than an example of “no government”? Is the notion that “Somalia” is “inevitable” based on a notion of human nature? Are claims about human nature extremely problematic, given what we know about anthropology and history and societies?
As for thinking about anarchism, David Graeber points out we live most of our lives outside the “authority” of government and state already. And if the idea of anarchism seems too idealistic, one defence of it may be it helps nudge the Overton window in a better direction. Another might be, “hey, I’m prepared to negotiate on the state, and my opening offer is anarchism! Let’s start from there and see where we get.”
Can you? Your examples of this paradise on Earth are just a tiny bit lacking.
I really need to get back to work, but I think it is relevant to note that the nation-state was largely created as a system of government to serve the interests of capital. One of its great virtues was to separate economic oppression from political oppression. That is, the slave master and feudal lord were both economic and political oppressors at the same time. The way to end both oppressions was obvious, and involved torches, pitchforks, machetes, and guillotines. When economic and political oppression seem to be unconnected, we’re left with Muley’s exasperated cry in The Grapes of Wrath: “Then who do we shoot?”
For those who are interested, Graeber and Wengow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a place to start. The point is not “there is a commune in the middle of Siberia that works like this” or even “the collectives during the Spanish Civil War are an example of this.” Rather, the point is we have all kinds of historical and contemporary examples where we live without need of the state, from volunteer fire departments to car pools to co-ops to helping your neighbour beer leagues…the list goes on and on. It’s not a question of utopias but of recognizing, encouraging, and building on practices many of us are already engaged in. Human nature is pretty malleable. We are in an economic and political system that rewards certain kinds of behaviour, much of it nasty and ugly. Imagine how we can help other behaviours flourish. 
"It’s easy if you try."
I really gotta get back to work!
Sure if you keep things small enough that everyone is in the same monkey sphere it can work. Everyone knows everyone else, if someone is abusing the system, or needs extra help, everyone knows the situation and can take informal action as a collective to rectify the situation. This doesn’t work for larger collectives because you will have conflicts between people or groups of people who don’t know or care about each other and these conflicts will have to be mediated by someone, so in the end you have someone you don’t know telling you want to do (i.e. a government). So you can balkanize and just have a bunch of little independent communes of 50 to 100 people that keep to themselves. But then what happens if there is a conflict between those communes. Well then you can either have them fight it out between themselves (quite possibly literally), or you can have a larger body that mediates the conflict. What do you know there is that government again.
The idea of government wasn’t some malevolent force that spontaneously appeared and took over every culture despite the fact that it made everything worse. It was developed independently because it works.
I grew up in a fluoridated water area, have not had any mal-effects, and have pretty good teeth to boot. I never knew of anyone suffering from a fluoride related impairment growing up.
Where I live now, (for the last 10 years or so) the municipality does not add fluoride to the water, and in fact the state “surgeon general” claims it’s bad, etc.-- the usual anti-government/alex jones nonsense. I don’t research those anti-fluoride studies because I think they’re made to fit a specific agenda.
An expert for the municipality says “we have enough naturally occurring fluoride in the water.” Fine. However, asked about the “dangers” he said they won’t remove the fluoride from the water! Bit of a paradox, eh?
I do see a lot of dental implant ads though. Quite the racket.
Let’s first distinguish between “government” and “social organization” or something similar. “Government” usually implies a small segment of society able to compel others and using force to do so as it sees fit and can get away with it. That’s different from “people coming together collectively for common purposes, including dispute resolution.”
Second, for a different take on how states evolved, James C. Scott’s short book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, offers a less sanguine, more sanguinary analysis, based on recent research.
The only way a group of larger than maybe a hundred (at the most optimistic; more realistic is 20) can “come together collectively for common purposes, including dispute resolution” is through a small segment of society able to compel the others.
This thread reminds me of a Bette Midler joke