In recent times there has been a fair amount of ink devoted to the concept that living in dense populations, using public transportation, and having every imaginable sector of goods and services at ones proximate disposal, should be a model that we aspire to. In other words, the “Calcutta Model”. It is touted as a concept that would preserve open space and farm land. “Walking Communities,” are put up as tomorrow’s model for sustainability. I don’t buy it.
I suggest that going the other direction is the wise thing to do at this point and time for those who can. For many years I called the Alaska Village of Talkeetna home and made critical observations of the benefits of living in a small town.
To begin with, we had no government presence. I know, we should have all died within a week, but we didn’t. We had no police force. “Oh my, who protected you?” Let me just say that mugging in Talkeetna would have been a poor career choice.
We had a volunteer “unpaid” fire department. Sure, the motto for the Talkeetna Volunteer Fire Department was, “We haven’t lost a foundation yet,” but it served us well.
If you can possibly get your mind around it, consider the cost savings to the citizens of Talkeetna by not employing government and a police force! And if you really want to allow your thinking to go buck wild, imagine the freedoms that we enjoyed from this self ruling arrangement.
When we wanted a park in Talkeetna, we built one. And no, we didn’t apply for a dang grant. It was our park, why should someone else be asked to pay for it? When a neighbor had a fire, we helped them rebuild. When someone was stalled along the road, we stopped to give assistance. In other words, we had a community that functioned properly.
I know what many are thinking, “We couldn’t possibly get along without large government and an immediate police presence.” And, certainly those living in large cities can’t; which is my point.
Humans are in fact tribal animals and when the tribes become too large our society begins to break down as it has in every city in the United States. When groups become too large to manage, we tend to hand the management of our lives over to strangers and no one is stranger than Congress. Large government is merely a product of large cities.
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