“We have a fire station that no one wants to operate.”
August 2, 2017 3:17 PM   Subscribe

"The Rise and Fall of the "Freest Little City in Texas." The town of Von Ormy, TX (pop 1,500) incorporated in 2008 as a an experiment in libertarian city management, relying largely on volunteers for their police, fire, water treatment, and animal control departments, while completely phasing out property taxes.

This made a lot of people very angry and has widely been regarded as a bad move. Still, so-called "liberty cities" continue to pop up all over Texas.

Previously, libertarians get slapped by the invisible hand.
posted by joechip (51 comments total) 35 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh right, people are assholes. That's why we have rules! Got it.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:26 PM on August 2, 2017 [20 favorites]


Sounds like a great home base for Organized Crime.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:37 PM on August 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


"If Von Ormy is a libertarian experiment with democracy, it’s one that hasn’t turned out as expected."

Or, you know, exactly as expected.
posted by flaterik at 3:41 PM on August 2, 2017 [92 favorites]


Flaterik, I was just coming to post that comment!
posted by TedW at 3:43 PM on August 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


sic semper moronis
posted by poffin boffin at 3:45 PM on August 2, 2017 [34 favorites]


"If Von Ormy is a libertarian experiment with democracy, it’s one that hasn’t turned out as expected."

I am a sovereign citizen of the Free Republic of Metafilter. No rules apply to me, gonna repost a quote and you and your gold-fringed flag can't stop me.
posted by Nelson at 3:46 PM on August 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


There would be no charge for building permits...

I've been involved in few projects that required a building permit. Is the cost of a permit ever significant? Isn't it usually, like, 1% (or less) of the project's budget? Would this have any material impact on anything, except for the city's ability to pay for the process?
posted by Western Infidels at 3:48 PM on August 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


Tobias: You know, Lindsay, as a therapist, I have advised a number of municipalities to explore a Libertarian approach where the municipality remains emotionally committed, but free to explore not having tax revenue or a government.

Lindsay: Well, did it work for those people?

Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but... But it might work for us.
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:49 PM on August 2, 2017 [34 favorites]


This guy screwed this town over, and now he's exporting. Talk about failing up.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:53 PM on August 2, 2017 [12 favorites]


I'm sure that the colossal failure of this - and every other - Libertarian Utopian Experiment was caused by the individual group not Libertarianing correctly and certainly had nothing to do with some fatal flaw at the core of the ideology itself.
posted by absalom at 3:53 PM on August 2, 2017 [55 favorites]


Ayn Rand wept.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:55 PM on August 2, 2017


Sounds like they made things too complicated. I grew up in a midwest village that only incorporated to block annexation. There's a mayor and board of trustees, but they hardly did anything except make sure the plowing and waste companies do their job, and everything was communicated fairly. Police and fire were provided by the Sheriff's department and a combined muni district for a low cost and very effective. The village assessed a (truly) small and stable tax that was understood to be a much better alternative to the bigger city's taxes and eminent domain actions. Nobody was or is interested in schemes to attract business or prove a point.
posted by michaelh at 3:55 PM on August 2, 2017 [8 favorites]


As mayor, Martinez de Vara’s first priority was to lure chain stores with the town’s low-tax, low-regulation branding. But there was a problem: Von Ormy lacked a sewer system and it would be expensive to connect to San Antonio’s main wastewater system.

Even if the town were flush with cash, what good is cash if you can't flush?
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:59 PM on August 2, 2017 [37 favorites]


"The lack of a centralized wastewater system made it more difficult to recruit businesses"

Huh, whod've thought businesses are ok paying higher taxes if it means they can have working toilets? This is why I am confused by the libertarian view that taxes and regulations are always bad. Taxes often pays for amenities which end up generating more wealth.

If this town had just bit the bullet and issued bonds to make a sewer system (seems hard to dispute the benefit of such a project) things may have turned out so much better .

On prieview, mandolin conspiracy said this much more eloquently
posted by Mayhembob at 4:02 PM on August 2, 2017 [16 favorites]


Huh, whod've thought businesses are ok paying higher taxes if it means they can have working toilets?

For capitalists, libertarians seem to have a very hard time understanding the concept of core competencies, and that sometimes things are so far outside your wheelhouse that it is worth paying something that isn't even necessarily the cheapest that service could possibly be obtained in order to never have to think about that service again.
Libertarians tend to put a weird amount of emphasis on cash and no emphasis at all on the value of anything else. So my time is only worth something if I'm selling it to someone in the form of goods or services. My time isn't worth something if I'm having to be on the phone with six companies to figure out who to get to come out to deal with my septic system, and yet I'm presumed to be an informed consumer so I have to do just that.
posted by Sequence at 4:37 PM on August 2, 2017 [28 favorites]


So they're gonna need a government bailout?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:40 PM on August 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


> If this town had just bit the bullet and issued bonds to make a sewer system (seems hard to dispute the benefit of such a project) things may have turned out so much better .

And then you need funds to maintain a sewer system. And then maintain it again. And then maintain it some more. You would have to ad-hoc bill the specific beneficiaries of any task performed on behalf of the sewer system, which will sometimes be a single household, and sometimes be every citizen, business and other organization. If only it was possible to establish an annual working budget and amortize those costs through some kind of large-scale nontargeted fundraising campaign conducted on a regular schedule!
posted by at by at 4:43 PM on August 2, 2017 [29 favorites]


Infrastructure like water/sewer is so very unexciting but really, kinda important for that whole civilization thing.

But, hey, Libertarianism CANNOT FAIL. It can only BE failed by ideological impurity. But don't ask us to nail down what that ideology is, exactly. THE INVISIBLE HAND WILL SAVE US ALL! I BELIEVE IN MARKET FAIRIES!
posted by rmd1023 at 4:59 PM on August 2, 2017 [10 favorites]


The City of Von Ormey website is under construction.

(Powered by Weebly)
posted by vverse23 at 5:04 PM on August 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


I think the last quote in the article points to something that's just as important in the failure as the philosophy: With a town that small, especially given modern mobility, it's a roll of the dice whether you'll get enough competent people to do all the things expected of a city. I bet that one in five of these towns will work out just fine because luck, and they'll become the poster cities in libertarian circles for the idea.
posted by clawsoon at 5:05 PM on August 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


Enter Art Martinez de Vara. At the time, Martinez de Vara was an ambitious third-year law student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, a local boy with a penchant for Texas history and right-wing politics.

So, basically, an ignorant neophyte hopped up on a heady cocktail of Utopianism, sold his town a bill of goods, and now they're paying for his ideals. Yup, the Libertarian dream.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:28 PM on August 2, 2017 [11 favorites]


Is this like that Simpsons episode where Bart convinced an entire town to "do what you feel" and everything went pear-shaped?
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:32 PM on August 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Infrastructure like water/sewer is so very unexciting but really, kinda important for that whole civilization thing.
posted by rmd1023 at 4:59 PM on August 2 [+] [!]
OMG this! Here we have two things that historians look for in determining whether something even QUALIFIES as civilization.
posted by Horkus at 6:01 PM on August 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


(Powered by Weebly)

Shouldn't they be pulling volunteer shifts to type out the responses to HTTP requests by hand?
posted by zachlipton at 7:10 PM on August 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Someone must have linked this in another thread, but -- The Short, Unhappy Life of a Libertarian Paradise. My favorite bit:
"One of the lessons: There’s a real cost to saving money.

Take the streetlights. Turning them off had saved the city about $1.25 million. What had not made the national news stories was what had happened while those lights were off. Copper thieves, emboldened by the opportunity to work without fear of electrocution, had worked overtime scavenging wire. Some, the City Council learned, had even dressed up as utility workers and pried open the boxes at the base of streetlights in broad daylight. Keeping the lights off might have saved some money in the short term, but the cost to fix what had been stolen ran to some $5 million."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:36 PM on August 2, 2017 [21 favorites]


rmd1023: "Infrastructure like water/sewer is so very unexciting but really, kinda important for that whole civilization thing."

Sure, you need an Aqueduct to expand your city past size 8, and Sewer System to pass 12.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:14 PM on August 2, 2017 [25 favorites]


Regardless of libertarianism, that was an excellent Hitch Hiker's guide reference! 👏🏼
posted by danhon at 8:22 PM on August 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


As well as having moved on to bigger and better things after wrecking the town, my guess would be that Martinez de Vara considers this experiment a success. After all, taxes are low, aren't they?

I get the impression from a lot of these guys that if taxes are super-low, then that is an end in and of itself. The Kansas experiment turned into a big failure of actually making the state more prosperous, but there's a certain strain of thinking that taxes should be at a super-low level, and civilization should decline to accommodate that level of taxation. There's very little concept among this crowd that the quality of life provided by public infrastructure and services has a value greater than the cost of taxation.
posted by deanc at 8:30 PM on August 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


Even as Von Ormy descended into chaos, Martinez de Vara’s own profile had been rising. Folks from around the state had started calling him with questions about how to form a liberty city. Martinez de Vara found himself with a niche law practice. He says he has helped four or five Texas towns incorporate as liberty cities, about half the state total in the last decade.

I've sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and, by gum, it put them on the map!
posted by danhon at 8:39 PM on August 2, 2017 [16 favorites]


I'm sure that the colossal failure of this - and every other - Libertarian Utopian Experiment was caused by the individual group not Libertarianing correctly and certainly had nothing to do with some fatal flaw at the core of the ideology itself.

I think that nearly every Utopian Experiment has failed, regardless of the ideology behind it. I am coming around to the idea that the best we can hope for is mediocrity because humans are terrible and little can be done about it.
posted by corb at 8:42 PM on August 2, 2017 [7 favorites]


I think that nearly every Utopian Experiment has failed, regardless of the ideology behind it. I am coming around to the idea that the best we can hope for is mediocrity because humans are terrible and little can be done about it.

I RTFA'd then came in to say -

Libertarianism is the same, IMO, as communism and polyamory.

A great idea until you add people in.

But, got here to find myself beaten. Thanks, pal, thanks A LOT!
posted by Samizdata at 8:58 PM on August 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


I work for a taxing authority and at least once a week I get a comment from the public about "all the damned taxes" and "how expensive it is to live in this state". Bookmarking this site for easy reference and forwarding.
posted by vignettist at 9:28 PM on August 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


I always suspect libertarianism in the states is largely fueled by people who suspect that American government is illegitimate wherever and whenever it provides government services for black people.
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:05 PM on August 2, 2017 [17 favorites]


sooo libertarians know that humans have invented writing, right? because no other group seems to spend so much effort ignoring how others have failed at exactly what they are trying to do, literally like one generation earlier. and one before that, and one before that, and one before that.
posted by wibari at 10:06 PM on August 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


Ayn Rand wept.


THIS PLEASES ME
posted by louche mustachio at 10:37 PM on August 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


In September, Martinez and Quintanilla voted to reclassify the mayor’s office as a conference room and mandated that Reyes pay for the desk’s relocation.

I love these two. That is exactly the way to deal with a stupid power structure and a tinpot dictator. Which is what libertarian fantasies always turn in to- a group of incapable or lazy people find someone who seems strong enough to do stuff for them then decide afterwards if they support them or not.
posted by fshgrl at 11:06 PM on August 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


The problem with libertarian paradises is that when they're in the big city, every libertarian fashions themselves to be randian heroes. I mean, they have it all - and could have even more if didn't have to pay taxes.
Add 1500 of them in a small town... and still everyone fashions the same, except they're mad because they live next to a tank of shit, the roads eventually look like a rally course, and there's no police or fire department because there are no unenlightened plebs paying taxes for city utilities.

For all the canned speeches they have about "burdens to society", those selfish assholes could well look in a mirror.
posted by lmfsilva at 4:53 AM on August 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


Homer: Marge, I agree with you, in theory. In theory, communism libertarianism works. In theory.
posted by tommasz at 5:48 AM on August 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


I grew up in a very small town in a rural area in Alberta - one which spent 20 years humming and hawing about whether to hook up to a municipal water supply - and I can understand where some of them are coming from. For most, it's not a grand libertarian experiment; it's just a desire to keep living the way they've always been living. They have their own well for water; they have their own septic tank for sewer; they can burn their own garbage in their own backyard. If somebody nasty comes around, they have their own guns to defend themselves. They make and fix as much as they can for themselves - just like an urban "Maker", but with less pretension. They've lived that way for a long time, and they want to keep living that way. Some of them are poor and can't afford to live any other way; DIY is the only way to get by.

The town set up this experiment which promised to keep things the way they are, and then they discovered that some of their neighbours - exactly the kind to run for city council - like cities and services and taxes. The town tried to stop the city, but the spirit of the city came anyway.
posted by clawsoon at 6:16 AM on August 3, 2017 [7 favorites]


Western Infidels: I've been involved in few projects that required a building permit. Is the cost of a permit ever significant? Isn't it usually, like, 1% (or less) of the project's budget? Would this have any material impact on anything, except for the city's ability to pay for the process?

1) The percentage of the cost depends on the project, and 2) this a thousand times, bolded for emphasis.

As a former county planner, I reviewed permits every day, both at general intake, and detailed plan review. In California (and other states that have more strenuous planning/ environmental review requirements), we were charging $2,000 for planning review of a $400 deck in certain communities, but that was based on the time to process the project and take it to a public hearing. (Those decks were in Cambria pine forest habitat, so even if you didn't have a Cambria pine tree on your property, you were still in the greater pine forest habitat.) But that was an extreme case, and we were looking for ways to justify reducing that cost while still covering the person-time required.

On the other end, if you weren't in a coastal community, and you weren't trying to do something near a creek or known sensitive areas, you could proceed to the building permit side, which was not so onerous or expensive, generally speaking. Still, the cost of the permit was the cost of staff's time to thoroughly review said permit. For an example of why strenuous consideration of building permits matters, folks in our building department liked to point out the very low injury and casualty rates for earthquakes in California compared to other parts of the world. It's more expensive and takes more time for that level of design and review, but as planners and engineers, we felt it was pretty well worth it.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:23 AM on August 3, 2017 [9 favorites]


I grew up in a very small town in a rural area in Alberta - one which spent 20 years humming and hawing about whether to hook up to a municipal water supply - and I can understand where some of them are coming from. For most, it's not a grand libertarian experiment; it's just a desire to keep living the way they've always been living. They have their own well for water; they have their own septic tank for sewer; they can burn their own garbage in their own backyard. If somebody nasty comes around, they have their own guns to defend themselves. They make and fix as much as they can for themselves - just like an urban "Maker", but with less pretension. They've lived that way for a long time, and they want to keep living that way. Some of them are poor and can't afford to live any other way; DIY is the only way to get by.


This is all very true, I also grew up in a place like that, rural SD, and it wasn't an ideological thing, it is just the way life works some places. In our case they weren't and aren't resisting anything much actively, there's no one around to trouble them.

I don't think that experience is applicable in this sort of case, where the community is very close to a larger city and formalizes their rural decentralization in the face of urban sprawl. It's an interesting mental space to imagine.
(I have a lot of thoughts but do have to run to work and it's terrible. This is what I can manage for now.)
posted by neonrev at 7:47 AM on August 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Though not a libertarian in any way, shape or form, I understand the citizens' dilemma and I was happy to see MichaelH's response (at 3:55pm). I live in a similar unincorporated area in Texas and I'd hate to see our area annexed. We have city water, good schools, good roads, good nearby hospitals, shopping, and great county police and fire services. What we don't get is wastewater/sewer, garbage pickup or city council representation. So we have septic systems, buy our garbage service (costs about $300 a year) and focus our political opinions at the county level. And our taxes are a third of what they'd be if we lived a 1/2 mile down the road in the area that did get annexed about 10 years ago. The kicker is that this annexed neighborhood got their taxes tripled, but no sewer system, and their house values are no higher than ours just down the road. So basically they're paying about $8000 more a year in property taxes for garbage pickup, slightly better road maintenance and the ability to vote in city council elections. So I'll remember should annexation become a threat that we should look into incorporating to avoid the perils of annexation.
posted by SA456 at 7:49 AM on August 3, 2017 [5 favorites]


One other thing that I learned about during my couple of years working on the water supply issue in the town I grew up in - a couple of years in the middle that never went anywhere - was fixed costs. Running the lines through town and hooking everybody up would cost maybe $1 million - $20,000 per household for 50 households, doable if it's stretched over a 20 or 30 year bond. Getting the line to the town would cost another $2-3 million, and now people aren't so sure. If the town had been four or five times the size, the fixed cost of getting the line to the town wouldn't have loomed so large, and the project would've gotten done much sooner.

I suspect that's part of what's going on with some of Von Ormy's infrastructure.
posted by clawsoon at 8:13 AM on August 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


The flip side, of course, is that much of this rural life was made possible by the genocide and/or rounding up on reserves of the First Nations population. Somebody in my extended family has pictures of tepees across from Grandma's farm, when they still had some freedom on their ancestral ranges. The life being defended is only a few generations old, and it was made possible by destroying another way of life.

So there's that, too. But the same can be said of most North American cities.
posted by clawsoon at 8:21 AM on August 3, 2017 [11 favorites]


"Heeyyy wait a minute, hold on here! This bandstand wasn't double-bolted! Hunh!"
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:22 AM on August 3, 2017


Dammit, sorry RobotVoodooPower. I could have read comments before leaving my own, but I didn't feel like it.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:27 AM on August 3, 2017


Metafilter: I could have read comments before leaving my own, but I didn't feel like it.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:17 AM on August 3, 2017 [10 favorites]


I wanted more about the federal grant money. Why they thought they were entitled to it and what exactly it was to be used for. Doesn't taking grant money from the feds violate some sort of libertarian tenet?
posted by lordrunningclam at 9:25 AM on August 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


For an interesting and very different angle on these issues, the BBC just broadcast a documentary called Accidental Anarchist (Iplayer, region locked; Youtube).

Carne Ross was a career diplomat who believed western democracy could save us all. But after the Iraq war he became disillusioned and resigned. This film traces Carne's worldwide quest to find a better way of doing things - from a farming collective in Spain, to Occupy Wall Street to Rojava in war-torn Syria - as he makes the epic journey from government insider to anarchist

The Rojava segment at the end of the documentary is particularly thought provoking, so stick with it if you find the first part - which reiterates the genesis of the Iraq war - hard work. (It isn't, because Ross was deeply embedded in the process at the UN, and his perspective is so worth learning.)
posted by Devonian at 10:21 AM on August 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


lordrunningclam: I wanted more about the federal grant money. Why they thought they were entitled to it and what exactly it was to be used for. Doesn't taking grant money from the feds violate some sort of libertarian tenet?

I suspect that only a small number of residents are committed, principled libertarians. Most of the rest of them are trying to keep things the way they were, because things were comfortable like that, unless an especially good deal convinces them to change. I'm pretty sure that it was a combination of federal, provincial and county grants that finally got a water system into my small town, for example; it was the grants that finally made it a good deal. For most of us, ideologies are flexible things to be used as it suits us in the moment. And that's usually a good thing.
posted by clawsoon at 10:39 AM on August 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


I have a great deal of sympathy with folks who don't want a sewerage system foisted on them for no good reason.

My small rural town has had a fairly stable population of 600-700 for at least the last thirty years. Until sixteen years ago, all the houses had septic tanks and backyard leach fields.

The local town water supply, formerly taken from the river that runs through the town, had to be shut down mainly because of high bacterial counts in that river. As it happens, this has always been mainly due to excessive irrigation extraction by, and runoff from, farms all along the river; but there was indeed a bacterial hot spot where the town's main storm water drain emptied into the river under the main road bridge, just downstream of the old water plant's intake.

It was completely obvious to anybody who could be bothered spending a couple of hours walking around the town that the nutrient load in the storm water drains was coming from a relatively small number of houses that ran their kitchen and bathroom grey water straight out into the street so as not to overload their undersized septic tank systems, and that simply requiring those properties to contain their grey water onsite (totally feasible; the town is small and the lots are large and have plenty of room for trees) would have fixed it.

But no. What happened instead was that most of the town got compulsorily sewered at vast expense. So instead of a few property owners having to pay a few thousand dollars each to contain grey water they should never have been dumping offsite in the first place, all the owners have been charged many thousands of dollars each to implement this ridiculous whole-town sewerage overkill.

And instead of putting in any kind of local wastewater treatment plant to - I dunno, maybe irrigate one of several local dairy farms to reduce its take from the river? - we got a little pumping station that burns shitloads of electricity on shoving our sewage down 20km of six inch pipe to the next town downstream, which already had its own pumping station to shove its sewage 30km down another pipeline to the next large town, which has a large treatment plant whose effluent drains straight into the Gippsland Lakes and contributes to their periodic algal blooms.

All of us will be paying for that pointless waste of energy in perpetuity.

I also own a second block of land out the back of my place, on which I do nothing more complicated than agist a few horses. It doesn't have a house on it. But it's now assessed and taxed as a sewered property, even though the sewer line runs five to seven metres deep along the uphill boundary of the block, and has no kind of access point for any residence I might eventually build on it. And fifteen years after that sewer trench went through I'm still buying in loads of topsoil to fill the ongoing subsidence caused by the fact that the contractor could not be arsed backfilling and compacting it properly and trucked three loads of rocks and clay offsite instead.

The whole situation is really fucking annoying. Work on it had already started before I bought my place here, or I would have raised a hell of a stink about it at Council.

That said: lol libertarians
posted by flabdablet at 6:12 AM on August 10, 2017 [4 favorites]


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