If You Can Leave, Can a Town Ban Anything?

A town, so I said agree, you said disagree. A town could ban anything it wants. Um I'm sure because of the absolute nature of the statement, anything, I probably you could probably oh, you could come up with a counter arguing okay, yeah, they shouldn't be able to ban, you know, ban breathing, whatever, right? So, you know, in it as a general point, it's like, yeah, it just like dovetails with the last thing. Like, yeah, if a town doesn't want a thing, why are we who are we to force it on them? Who is like the external party here that's enforcing this on a people? And so um free to leave is an interesting part of this, as long as you're free to leave. I actually think that's like one of as I think about what is localism and how would you kind of apply it in any kind of a universal sense. I think that's one of the important things that uh should be universal is people should not be prisoners, so you should be able to leave.

However, you should not necessarily be free to enter. And so you end up with a situation where it's like you're free to leave, but you gotta find someone who wants you or will accept you too. Um so I think that can balance out that sort of free to leave doesn't mean free to free to come, and um yeah, you should be able to ban ban what you want. Now, uh I guess this actually brings up the the second amendment issue, though, is like should a town be able to uh allow to ban guns, uh, for instance. And that's an interesting like structural issue with the US. The US has said actually one of our you know, universal, as far as the US goes, principles is well, uh you should be able to bear arms so that uh it's sort of an informal uh you know, refresh button, and um you can you can restart the system in the most uh brutal way if it becomes necessary.

You know, that's what the second amendment really is. It's not the you know individual self protection, it's it's it's global reset potential or something like that. Um and so should a town be able to do that? Well, I don't know, they do, right? Cities do that. So the issue I have with free to leave is on the one hand, uh A.O. Hirshman had a book that I reference all the time, uh, or a large essay, uh Loyalty, Voice and Exeter. I always get it in the wrong order. And in my personal life, I tend to always come down to exit. You know, if I don't like an online group chat I'm in, I'm not going to try to lobby people to talk less about a certain topic. Um I'm not going to just suck it up. I'll just leave. There's lots of other stuff going on in life. I've got other group chats, et cetera. Um, if Massachusetts is behaving like a bunch of dicks, I will not try to change the system.

I will just pack up and move to New Hampshire as I did uh 12 or 13 years ago. But we were talking before about off-books costs where you hollow out communities. You think, oh, this is great, we're getting wrenches cheaper and we're exporting grain to buy them. Um but there is the off-book cost of when we shipped the uh the textile mill out of North Carolina, and then suddenly all the families there fell into joblessness and started using drugs and went on welfare. That isn't accounted for in the import-export numbers. So when we talk about free-to-leave, there is a lot of social structure embedded in a community where you are longtime neighbors of a guy, you lend them your tools, he helps you mow your lawn, your aunt is next door, this and that. And so free to leave, free, you know, this gets back to the sort of you know, free as in software or free as in beer, um, you are free to leave, but in fact, there's a huge cost there.

And so when we talk about cost, there's always the concept in economics of a dead weight cost where you've got your supply and demand curve. And if in general uh the market clearing price of apples is one dollar per apple, and then the state puts a tax raising the price of apples effectively to $2, but the recipient still gets a dollar for it. Uh the amount consumed, the amount that people will want to buy at $2 is a lot less than the amount that they would want to buy at $1. So there is this big region of the graph, which is foregone profit or foregone uh enjoyment, where lots of people who uh would buy an apple at a buck fifty now don't buy an apple and they lose out, you know. Um and so when we say that you are free to leave this town, there are people who, well, in fact, I would like to leave this town now that my second amendment rights are infringed or now that this has happened or that has happened.

Um, and yet I'm not perfectly free because there is a big cost involved. I would have to sever these social bonds. I've customized my property to my own liking over 20 years. I planted orchards, I wanted to retire and pick apples in those orchards and share them with my grandkids and this and that. So there is sort of this libertarian concept, and it's expressed in science fiction that you know, sort of everyone lives on a spaceship or everyone lives in a mobile home, and so you can just pack up and move away and this and that. Um, and I I think that these people have built these utopian visions with technology very intentionally designed to make it seem frictionless and to make it seem low cost, because they realize that in the real world there are huge costs. I mean, for first of all, you're gonna pay three or six percent of your house price to a realtor, you're gonna pay a 1.5% transfer tax in New Hampshire, in addition to all of the soft stuff, like losing the customizations of your farm and losing your neighbors.

So, on the one hand, yes, um exit is great. Uh the system, every system always depends on exit as the final choice, um, and yet a huge amount of destruction of utility can be done even while everyone is free. But okay, but what about the other part? A town can ban anything it wants. And and I guess what I'm arguing is because the cost of doing that uh is so high, we should tread very carefully here. So I'm free. I mean, this is this is the interesting thing that's sort of like, what does it mean free? And that's sort of your point here, is it's not like a freeze and there's no cost. You're free as in no one's preventing you from choosing to incur those costs. And so again, let's get back to putting prices on things. I mean, here's a thought. If 55% of the population of a town thinks, wouldn't it be great if we got rid of guns in this town?

My response would be, that does sound great. Why don't you buy the easement of owning guns off of the other 45% of the population? And if that costs $3, that is almost nothing in the town budget, and it turns out that you're not actually consuming much utility, that freedom wasn't worth much. But if the first guy says, yeah, I'm not going to surrender my right for less than a million dollars, the second guy says, Yeah, a million here, suddenly realize this is a trillion dollar project, and you realize, oh, if we're not willing to pay that, then the benefit that we get from imposing this is much less than the cost it imposes on people. It's interesting. Was your example like 50-50 almost, right? 51%. I I it we seem to end up in that sort of 51%, 49% case a lot. And I wonder why, but it sort of comes down to this idea of local patches, right?

It's almost like every time we see that pattern, we should ask yourself, why are why are why are people mixed up this way? Why are they not people over here, you know, 51% over here, 49% over here, where everyone's happy. And um it's it's really like the way we we even tally these things up reveals that we're not doing a good job with these spatial patterns. Oh, I disagree. I I think there's something very, very interesting going on here. In economics, there's this concept called hotelling's law. Uh does everyone know this? Does anyone know this? Okay. The simple version is we have a boardwalk, it's a mile long. Um, and we assume that you know, customers. Oh, thank you very much, appreciate it. Uh, and we assume that customers are roughly evenly distributed along the boardwalk. And we've got one vendor who's gonna start selling ice cream, and we've got a second vendor who's gonna start selling ice cream.

Where should they position themselves? You might say, oh, maybe at the one quarter mark or the one-third mark each on the one-third mark. This is great because it will minimize walking for the customers and this and that. So let's start with that as the initial condition. Now, everyone to the left of the leftmost vendor is just gonna walk to him. He's the shortest one. Everyone to the right of the rightmost vendor will walk to him. Let's talk about the people in the middle. They will split where they go. From the exact 50% point, some will go left. From the other side of the 57% point, uh, they will go to the right. Now, what are the incentives for these two vendors? Each of them uh should be inclined to pick up their shack and move it 10 feet closer to the midpoint because this shifts the midpoint from the midpoint of the boardwalk to the midpoint between the two vendors.

So you iterate this a few times, and what you end up getting is the two vendors both converged at the 50% point, and each of them has sort of an absolute monopoly on all of the customers to one side or the other. Um, and yet we have increased the total average distance that people will walk to get ice cream. This logic is not particularly interesting for ice cream vendors, who cares? But this logic is quite interesting for Coke and Pepsi. So, on the entire spectrum of beverages that you might have, should it be more sweet or should it have more of a citric acid bite? Um, you could imagine a world where they're spaced out, but what happens is the incentives are for Coke and Pepsi to both converge to the 50% preference point. And this applies to political parties. So I I see all the time, oh, if only XYZ happened, then the uh the then the Red Party or the Blue Party would have an absolute lock on electoral politics forever and never.

No, they wouldn't, because the political parties, like let's let's say that we brought in a hundred million uh illegal aliens, we give them all citizenship, and all of these illegal aliens want free welfare or whatever they want. What you would see is that the two political parties would both shift to once again divide the population evenly. So where I'm going with this is the questions that you end up asking in this, and you're saying, but why is it that you know it's always 51%, 49%? And you're right, it is always 51%, 49%. And my assertion is that is because of hoteling's law, we pick the political battles that are 51% and 49%. We are not having a debate where one party is saying we should hand out free machine guns to every four-year-old. I mean, you know, Michael Granger and I in the State House are saying that, but no one else is saying that.

Because if we stake that out, then the Dems would stake something else out, and they would get 99%. So you end up moving to the center where the Dems are saying, well, yes, of course, there's um concealed carry, but you shouldn't do it in schools. And uh the right is saying, and I I think I saw Sam Farrington here in the audience earlier, the right is saying, yes, you should do it in schools. Um so you end up getting very close so that we split uh 50. Yeah, the most information. I mean, it's it's if you have a, you know, you you brought up uh, I guess a Boolean, but like a Bernoulli's kind of thing, the most information is at the 50-50, like flipping a coin. So it's a similar idea, actually. I guess uh that that that could be why things tend to be the 50%. I think there's another effect where uh we are looping in very large, uh spatially large portions to where so imagine there is a situation, just as thought experiment, where you have you know town black, town white right next to each other.

If you count the preferences over that region, you've got a 50-50. But that's very different than a checkerboard. And both problems exist where we we uh do things statistically and we get 50-50, and uh statistics like that destroy the spatial patterns that are present. So there are spatial patterns that are that are present, and we do destroy them in that way. But I I agree with you totally that we tend to pick political battles that are the most information rich in that sense. Um so um we are jumping. Yeah, I already said how much I disdain democracy, but the people have voted, and there's like a vernoullian hoteling's law. So you disdain democracy. What do you what are you uh in favor of? Uh markets and/or neo-fascism, I don't know. It's complicated. Uh what about you know, one of the things I really like about living New Hampshire is the town meeting, which is like pure democracy.

Very rare in the US to have this. And I tend to think it kind of works, at least it works in my town. My town's about a thousand people, so it's a small thing. And uh I think it's sort of like uh uh uh what do you call the uh Dunbar's number, right? It's like I I think democracy does work up to about a thousand people, and then from there not not so much anymore. Um what do you think about town meeting? Um Does your town have it? Oh, yeah, yeah. Um I think that one problem that you always see with systems is selection bias. And everybody knows the meme of the airplane with the red dots, and so uh you know selection bias. And so you have anytime there's concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, you always motivate every member of the police union shows up at the meeting, every member of the school teacher.

Um I I find town meeting interesting. It's it's better than say uh systems with very large feedback loops, uh large and laggy and obscured feedback loops like the federal government. Right.