A couple of months ago, I blogged about how the residents of Colorado Springs were taking their aversion to taxes so far that the city was going to have to stop some basic services, like shutting down streetlights.
Now, WSJ tells us that some residents were actually begging for their services to be cut. And, for now, at least, some people are stepping up and volunteering to replace missing services. But of course, that's less true in poorer communities, where people simply can't afford the time and money it would take to keep open services like community centers, which have drawn the most ire from the anti-tax crusaders. That gave a libertarian councilmember, Sean Paige, a new perspective:
But when the city council tapped him to fill a vacancy last summer, Mr. Paige says, he promised to represent the views of the residents of his district, who want the centers to remain open.
"I'm dealing with the city as it exists," he says, "not in theory or as I desire it to be."
He backed a proposal to give the centers $400,000 to help them stay open until they could find donors and became one of their biggest fundraisers. And that's exactly spot-on about theory versus reality. If I'd met more libertarians who weren't white, middle-class men who grew up comfortably and had high expectations for the future as a birthright, I could give more credence to their worldview.
Regardless, I think Colorado Springs is about to experience an abbreviated re-enactment of our social evolution, the one that led to government in the first place. The article points to an unemployed technology executive named Steve Immel who started a volunteer program in which volunteers sign a contract with the city to empty the trash cans and try to get volunteers to join their effort:
Mr. Immel has set up Web sites that allow the parks groups—38 have been organized so far—to communicate and post schedules. The first cans were returned the last weekend in March.
Mr. Immel says he isn't sure how long the volunteer efforts will last. But he thinks they will be educational. After a while, "people will probably think, 'Gosh, we ought to hire someone to do this,'" he says. "Well, you did: the Parks Department."
-- Monica Potts
