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The problem is deeper than that. This isn't Chicago competing against St. Louis. This is St. Louis competing against St. Louis. There's a reason I don't separat
by dionidium 9y ago
The problem is deeper than that. This isn't Chicago competing against St. Louis. This is St. Louis competing against St. Louis. There's a reason I don't separate the finances of my kitchen from the finances of my living room. The whole household is the right unit of measure. Chopping up one "city" into 90+ smaller "cities" is a legal fiction. In some very real sense -- in almost every real sense -- it's just one city. All these nonsense ways of chopping it up further are an historical accident. It's all contingent bologna.
- ryanianian 9y agoThat sounds like a real pain. New Jersey is famously divided into extremely small towns and it leads to lots of redundancy and waste and probably unhealthy competition between the towns. To be honest, the problem may be the dividing of the cities as such. The solution may instead tax and run all of them as a single block (e.g. minimize city government in favor of county) or even combine into a single city. This is moving the goalpost of the conversation above a bit, but my point is that the problem may not necessarily be "cities compete," the problem may be with the local bureaucracy. This can manifest in lots of ways like you describe.