{"id":1641,"date":"2009-10-29T07:36:19","date_gmt":"2009-10-29T11:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=1641"},"modified":"2011-10-21T11:29:04","modified_gmt":"2011-10-21T15:29:04","slug":"there-are-many-ways-to-destroy-a-neighbourhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/10\/29\/there-are-many-ways-to-destroy-a-neighbourhood\/","title":{"rendered":"There are many ways to destroy a neighbourhood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chicago is contemplating one of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fr33agents.com\/1242\/rat-on-your-neighbor\/\" target=\"_blank\">more effective ones<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Breaking down communities by creating incentives for friends and neighbors to betray one another is a much more effective tool in developed nations with less salient cultural cleavages a ruler can exploit. Creating distrust in society increases the public\u2019s demand for government and reduces our ability to create (market and non-market) voluntary institutions to compete with government. If we think our neighbors are out to get us, we\u2019re less likely to want to deal with them on a voluntary basis and more likely to demand they be controlled by government. Destroying community is good for government.<\/p>\n<p>The Chicago city government seems to have realized this. It is considering a \u201cTax Whistleblower Program\u201d which would pay people to rat on \u201ctax cheats.\u201d Grassers will most likely be paid a percentage of back taxes collected. The city officials are claiming that it\u2019s \u201cjust another way of bringing people into compliance.\u201d No doubt it will be an effective one too, since community can be a fragile thing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>All it takes is one neighbourhood busybody being financially rewarded for squealing on the guy down the street. Everything tends to snowball as trust evaporates and everyone starts to view their neighbours as potential threats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chicago is contemplating one of the more effective ones: Breaking down communities by creating incentives for friends and neighbors to betray one another is a much more effective tool in developed nations with less salient cultural cleavages a ruler can exploit. Creating distrust in society increases the public\u2019s demand for government and reduces our ability [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,84,9],"tags":[372,755,118],"class_list":["post-1641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-law","tag-chicago","tag-incentives","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11724,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions\/11724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}