Radley points out, in a brilliantly simple way, the difference between what happens when people expect government to do something and what happens when they don't. It's called the tragedy of the commons.
where people expect the city to send eventually plows, the road is still snowed. Where the city has no history of sending a plow, and isn’t likely to, residents grabbed shovels, and cleared the road in 24 hours.
I have personal experience with this. Where I lived in Florida as a small child, the city picked up trash, but not leaves. The residents there knew exactly how to get rid of their leaves, but could not begin to imagine how trash would be collected without government doing it for them. Where I lived in North Carolina in 1997, the county picked up leaves, but not trash. We had competing companies that picked up our trash, and some of us took our trash to the dump ourselves, but we all figured out how to get trash removed from our properties, while most of my neighbors had no idea how leaves could ever be disposed of (except those with compost piles).
Refer back to the show four weeks ago on 13 January. We talked about how the northern half of the Ivory Coast effectively has no government, and is thriving, compared to the southern half. The government bureaucrats have moved south, leaving no bureaucrats to run the schools there. So the parents stepped up to fund and manage the schools themselves. And the parents did it better.
When civil servants fled south, volunteer teachers, like Ali Ouattara, stepped forward to try to keep things going.
"We didn't want the kids to become child soldiers, so we tried to give them something. This is how we became teachers," says Mr Ouattara, who lost his job at the university at the start of the crisis.
Most of the volunteer teachers had limited qualifications and no experience of teaching.
At first they had almost no resources as the schools had been ransacked and the lawlessness meant they were scared to discipline their pupils, who were sometimes armed.
Gradually with contributions from parents, the ad-hoc schools helped save a generation of children, and in some years the rebel zone got better results in national exams than the government zone.
In the absence of government there, they managed to set up television stations, postal delivery, and policing services, all without forcibly extracting taxes from residents. The result is a thriving business community, together with all of the services that virtually nobody believes are achievable without government - without government.
The lesson is: this belief you have that government is a necessary evil is all in your mind. The only reason you need government is if you really do want to steal from and aggress against your neighbor.
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