Does it make sense to talk about "the government" in this age? It probably misguides us more than informs us. I've always felt the perception of government at the time is closer to our perception of the captain of the local football team - at best distant and upholding the honor of the village, at worst a thief with a title - rather than how we view it today. Authority of information lay with the church. Maybe replace by "Persons of wealth in positions of power"?
I don't think a city of more than 100,000 would be possible without a substantial amount of civil management.
Deciding with bits are for streets and which bits are for buildings needs an arbiter of som sort for starters.
If a place had a sewer it probably had a government.
Sometimes I like to recall that somewhere in Tenochtitlan there must have been some Aztec administrator doing a job like making sure the road signs are repainted every few years.
Not sure you need any of that. My entire 'city' is private property including the streets. There is absolutely no one to manage them, no HOA, absolutely nothing. If you can't drive on them you literally have to bust out a tractor and fix it. There is no public water or sewer, no public utilities, so you build them yourself and the amortized cost is easily half of paying some asshole working for the state to administer it. No building inspection, no code inspections. No policeman and no fire; you defend your own life and property rather than some crazed man "protecting and serving" the fuck out of you. Taxes are ~$0. Absolutely glorious. I'd be happy if everywhere was like that.
I'm not claiming there is literally no government, I'm claiming they are not acting in planning or maintenance ('civil management') capacity. If you have an easement contract to travel on a 'street' and someone violates it by building a house on it you can still sue them but the government has nothing to do with planning that. The population is not quite 100k but also not an order of magnitude lower either.
Yeah this has happened, where someone went into the easement. Though with fences instead of houses. People just drive around. Realistically no one has decided to die over a fence or house being in the way and no one has decided to die over blocking a car from going around. It's one of those thought exercises that sounds interesting but isn't actually an issue.
Now I suppose at this point you'll move on to the next goal posts. We've been deregulated for 20+ years and we got this long list of gotchas by the statists when we did it but none of the hysterical hypothetical happened and largely because anyone capable of feeding themselves soon realizes acting in extreme bad faith in a place without police is worse for them than it is the people around them. You can add all the 'but but' whatubaut this and that but it simply isn't any more a problem than the fact we also haven't installed anti-aircraft lasers in case aliens arrive.
I'm glad you have the option to live somewhere like that. I'm also glad you can't forcibly impose it on everyone else. I'll take a moderate level of corruption over a completely unregulated anarchic hellhole, thank you very much.
~Most of rural AZ and probably rural AK is like this. There are some 'cities' that never incorporated and have street grids without any sort of government administering them nor any organized system of maintenance.
Socialism seems to be working fine in Canada, it's just selective. Health care, roads, police, fire fighters, sewage, energy & energy infrastructure are all socially owned.
Eh 1630s in not the bronze age. The Netherlands was a republic, with quite a complex state apparatus. Sure it wasn't a democracy but there still was a government.
