I love the vision and optimism, Elle! It’d be cool to learn more on how people who buy this vision can think about how to help make it into a reality within their own community.
So if we make cities independent, and they actively go about improving things, what insures that the people that live there benefit and don't have to move down to South Carolina just to find work, while meanwhile, people from all over the country move to that city to take the place of the local workforce, many of whom end up homeless in their, albeit independent and thriving, home town.
An argument then is to be made that you must prevent free movement of people across local boundaries to make this work.
A corollary is that when your local city does all sorts of things to improve the local life, the businesses rather than sourcing locally, source from other cities across the nation, and so on, and local funds flow out, impoverishing the local economy and the very businesses doing this, and return as capital ownership by the, now rather unified (no need to discuss independently billionaires and multinational corporations as the issue anymore) one world economy.
So your cities need not just land value taxes, but tariffs.
"If states remit a percent of their economies to the federal government"..."as the nation pays off its debts."
It seems a significant loss of currency sovereignty for the government not to use its bank-like powers of creating deposits when it spends. The cities currently have no such bank-like access to clearinghouse facilities such as the Federal Reserve or its, very slightly, larger private sector twin, TCH. So essentially, the cities lack currency sovereignty.
Of course you know by now that I have proposals to solve this. Passing currency sovereignty to the cities, that is.
I think my criticism of that path still remains the same: The federal govt (the money printing agency) could print money and use it in this way, but I don’t think they will. And those cities would be unequally distributed across the nation, which makes it a politically hard sell for the use of fed printed funds. Anyway, ultimately, I think the cities should own themselves rather than being federally owned. So we still have the localization problem.
"But I don't think they will." Of course, they already are: forty percent (my back of napkin calculation) of domestic bank account deposits, yours, mine, Union Pacific Railroad's, were spent, not lent into existence.
"a politically hard sell for the use of fed printed funds"
Then close the Fed account at the Fed, so it can't print funds anymore! You keep throwing up weak barriers to the idea!
"The cities should own themselves."
So give the cities monetary sovereignty. If you don't want to give the cities access to the central bank, the Federal Reserve, give each city its *own* central bank-like clearinghouse for its payments and tax receipts, but make sure it is *not* politically independent or the city ends up owned by its central bank rather than by itself.
There may be just one example of a local government owned bank left from before (1918) the idea fell out of fashion:
It's not a municipal mini-central bank. Or is it?--"The Bank of North Dakota (BND) already acts as the depository for all state taxes, fines, and fees." All that remains is for it to exclusively spend through this bank and, for the municipality itself, anyway, the Federal Reserve is irrelevant. Provide clearinghouse services also, and for the local banks, and if possible, businesses, and it serves as a local mini central bank.
Well, while the Fed does issue physical currency, the Fed doesn't really "print" most deposits. It's kind of a useless addendum to the Federal Reserve system of accounts and clearinghouse for payments it presides over. Just like the U.S. Treasury has bank-like access to the Federal Reserve payments system, as do almost all banks; every city should be given access, to be fair.
But you didn't like the smell of the Fed. Who does, LOL, "End the Fed!" So I said, alright, let's just give each city it's own version, just like the 47 big banks have their own version in TCH (for ACH payments) and CHIPS (wire transfer). If you want to look at very small examples of mini-central banks, one has the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, within which each commodity, pork rinds, cattle futures, whatever, has it's own clearinghouse through which payments settle. So it's very doable. Just make sure the city owns its mini-Fed, and not its mini Fed the city...
I love pushing the responsibility & authority down to the lowest level and ultimately enabling cities and states to become more self sufficient. We can the ratchet down the federal government responsibility & authority to only things which benefit all people in the country.
Autonomy is such a key word that few people pay attention to. Glad to see you riffing on this so elegantly and thoughtfully, Elle. We visited some of those Scottish islands for study when I was in grad school. Rough and beautiful places to live, and lovely people with bigger smiles and hearts than city folk ... at least in part on account of their ownership and autonomy.
Anybody who recommends decreasing our dependence on Washington gets my attention. It's time to let go of the notion that Big Brother knows best. In reality, Big Brother is a bloated, lethargic, self-serving, unresponsive beast. But that's just my opinion...
We would do well to recognize that the federal government is constitutionally supposed to behave much like the EU. Just as the European states created the EU and control it, the American states created the federal government and allegedly control it. But the two parties have stomped all over that concept. We now have government in which the two parties are the ultimate 'authority', constitution be damned.
So, yes, let's take a weed whacker to the federal overgrowth, and trim it back to what the constitution stipulates.
But does that solve all our problems? Of course not. Elle seems to think that local control will solve our problems. I prefer local control. I don't know why everybody doesn't want that. But local governments are still made out of politicians, and there is your essential problem. There is no reason to presume that public ownership of anything is automatically an advantage over private ownership.
It is absurd to presume that we all want the things, or even should want the same things. So, what interests will the politicians represent? They will represent the interests of their biggest campaign donors. Count on it.
And that is why private ownership works best, if not perfectly. Each person or group can invest and make choices that suit them. It's their time, their life, and their money. Why should someone else be in charge?
"We could convert a lot of the world’s land to autonomous communities this way." What the hell is an 'autonomous community'? There is no such thing. There used to be, but no community today can be autonomous.
As for public ownership, nothing in the USA precludes that. Cities own land. They own the schools, the parks, the libraries, the roads. They enter into public/private partnerships for things such as hotels, convention centers, theaters, whatever. Legally, everything that Elle suggests is doable, and is being done to some extent or another. The question remains, who is in charge, and are they honest and competent? And will the next generation also be honest and competent?
There never has been, and never will be, Utopia. We can only do the best we can.
Yes, I think we should have local land ownership and local fiscal autonomy (and much more than cities have of both now). I think that solves part of our problems, but not all of them. The theory I'm developing for my book would also replace politicians with citizens assemblies, thereby solving another part of the problem.
Utopia is not the end goal—it's the neverending pursuit of "better."
This is really cool! I hadn't heard of most of these new types of autonomous cities.
One thing that stood out to me was making land trusts with strong communities, mainly because how do those communities handle conflict within each other?
Maybe I'm reading it incorrectly, but one of the pre-reqs for this was a strong community which implies people knowing each other at minimum.
So would the initial steps towards this future also include cultivating more community with our neighbors?
Cause I'm imagining some conflict when people make a land trust for a community but they don't want "them" in this community.
Have you run into how any info on those communities handling that conflict?
I don't think a "community" has to be a "likeminded community." Here I'm using "community" as "people who live in a certain area." And they don't need to all agree on anything except that the land they all live on should be owned by and benefit all of them, not property developers or governments far away. That's more than enough common ground to establish a trust!
That said, I am highly in favor of cultivating more community with our neighbors, and think that's a valuable first step for taking action together. We do that by hosting block parties and hosting events on our porches for all of our neighbors. I've seen other people start "coffee clubs"—going door to door to invite people to stop by the front yard on Sunday mornings for coffee. These kinds of things can lead to community action. For example, a neighborhood near us got a bunch of the neighbors to contribute and buy an empty lot on their street and turn it into a swimming pool. In some neighborhoods, why not buy your town too?
I love the vision and optimism, Elle! It’d be cool to learn more on how people who buy this vision can think about how to help make it into a reality within their own community.
I’m working on a follow up!!! More to come….
So if we make cities independent, and they actively go about improving things, what insures that the people that live there benefit and don't have to move down to South Carolina just to find work, while meanwhile, people from all over the country move to that city to take the place of the local workforce, many of whom end up homeless in their, albeit independent and thriving, home town.
An argument then is to be made that you must prevent free movement of people across local boundaries to make this work.
A corollary is that when your local city does all sorts of things to improve the local life, the businesses rather than sourcing locally, source from other cities across the nation, and so on, and local funds flow out, impoverishing the local economy and the very businesses doing this, and return as capital ownership by the, now rather unified (no need to discuss independently billionaires and multinational corporations as the issue anymore) one world economy.
So your cities need not just land value taxes, but tariffs.
"If states remit a percent of their economies to the federal government"..."as the nation pays off its debts."
It seems a significant loss of currency sovereignty for the government not to use its bank-like powers of creating deposits when it spends. The cities currently have no such bank-like access to clearinghouse facilities such as the Federal Reserve or its, very slightly, larger private sector twin, TCH. So essentially, the cities lack currency sovereignty.
Of course you know by now that I have proposals to solve this. Passing currency sovereignty to the cities, that is.
I think my criticism of that path still remains the same: The federal govt (the money printing agency) could print money and use it in this way, but I don’t think they will. And those cities would be unequally distributed across the nation, which makes it a politically hard sell for the use of fed printed funds. Anyway, ultimately, I think the cities should own themselves rather than being federally owned. So we still have the localization problem.
"But I don't think they will." Of course, they already are: forty percent (my back of napkin calculation) of domestic bank account deposits, yours, mine, Union Pacific Railroad's, were spent, not lent into existence.
"a politically hard sell for the use of fed printed funds"
Then close the Fed account at the Fed, so it can't print funds anymore! You keep throwing up weak barriers to the idea!
"The cities should own themselves."
So give the cities monetary sovereignty. If you don't want to give the cities access to the central bank, the Federal Reserve, give each city its *own* central bank-like clearinghouse for its payments and tax receipts, but make sure it is *not* politically independent or the city ends up owned by its central bank rather than by itself.
There may be just one example of a local government owned bank left from before (1918) the idea fell out of fashion:
https://moneyontheleft.org/2026/02/22/reclaiming-the-public-interest-cities-should-sell-municipal-bonds-to-their-own-public-banks/
It's not a municipal mini-central bank. Or is it?--"The Bank of North Dakota (BND) already acts as the depository for all state taxes, fines, and fees." All that remains is for it to exclusively spend through this bank and, for the municipality itself, anyway, the Federal Reserve is irrelevant. Provide clearinghouse services also, and for the local banks, and if possible, businesses, and it serves as a local mini central bank.
Are you saying that cities should be the money-printing authority? Not the fed?
Well, while the Fed does issue physical currency, the Fed doesn't really "print" most deposits. It's kind of a useless addendum to the Federal Reserve system of accounts and clearinghouse for payments it presides over. Just like the U.S. Treasury has bank-like access to the Federal Reserve payments system, as do almost all banks; every city should be given access, to be fair.
But you didn't like the smell of the Fed. Who does, LOL, "End the Fed!" So I said, alright, let's just give each city it's own version, just like the 47 big banks have their own version in TCH (for ACH payments) and CHIPS (wire transfer). If you want to look at very small examples of mini-central banks, one has the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, within which each commodity, pork rinds, cattle futures, whatever, has it's own clearinghouse through which payments settle. So it's very doable. Just make sure the city owns its mini-Fed, and not its mini Fed the city...
I didn't know I was for communities buying cities but here I am on this bandwagon.
I love pushing the responsibility & authority down to the lowest level and ultimately enabling cities and states to become more self sufficient. We can the ratchet down the federal government responsibility & authority to only things which benefit all people in the country.
Exactly.
Autonomy is such a key word that few people pay attention to. Glad to see you riffing on this so elegantly and thoughtfully, Elle. We visited some of those Scottish islands for study when I was in grad school. Rough and beautiful places to live, and lovely people with bigger smiles and hearts than city folk ... at least in part on account of their ownership and autonomy.
That's amazing you got to visit some of them, if you have any pictures feel free to share in the DFOS community! https://app.dfos.com/j/z6fk6tdaeae7c43nthhh3a
Anybody who recommends decreasing our dependence on Washington gets my attention. It's time to let go of the notion that Big Brother knows best. In reality, Big Brother is a bloated, lethargic, self-serving, unresponsive beast. But that's just my opinion...
We would do well to recognize that the federal government is constitutionally supposed to behave much like the EU. Just as the European states created the EU and control it, the American states created the federal government and allegedly control it. But the two parties have stomped all over that concept. We now have government in which the two parties are the ultimate 'authority', constitution be damned.
So, yes, let's take a weed whacker to the federal overgrowth, and trim it back to what the constitution stipulates.
But does that solve all our problems? Of course not. Elle seems to think that local control will solve our problems. I prefer local control. I don't know why everybody doesn't want that. But local governments are still made out of politicians, and there is your essential problem. There is no reason to presume that public ownership of anything is automatically an advantage over private ownership.
It is absurd to presume that we all want the things, or even should want the same things. So, what interests will the politicians represent? They will represent the interests of their biggest campaign donors. Count on it.
And that is why private ownership works best, if not perfectly. Each person or group can invest and make choices that suit them. It's their time, their life, and their money. Why should someone else be in charge?
"We could convert a lot of the world’s land to autonomous communities this way." What the hell is an 'autonomous community'? There is no such thing. There used to be, but no community today can be autonomous.
As for public ownership, nothing in the USA precludes that. Cities own land. They own the schools, the parks, the libraries, the roads. They enter into public/private partnerships for things such as hotels, convention centers, theaters, whatever. Legally, everything that Elle suggests is doable, and is being done to some extent or another. The question remains, who is in charge, and are they honest and competent? And will the next generation also be honest and competent?
There never has been, and never will be, Utopia. We can only do the best we can.
Yes, I think we should have local land ownership and local fiscal autonomy (and much more than cities have of both now). I think that solves part of our problems, but not all of them. The theory I'm developing for my book would also replace politicians with citizens assemblies, thereby solving another part of the problem.
Utopia is not the end goal—it's the neverending pursuit of "better."
How would 'citizen assemblies' not become politicized? What power would they have? What would their true authority be?
And the really big question: Would they make things better or worse? Not just in your opinion, but in citizens opinions.
I'll be writing about that shortly!
This is really cool! I hadn't heard of most of these new types of autonomous cities.
One thing that stood out to me was making land trusts with strong communities, mainly because how do those communities handle conflict within each other?
Maybe I'm reading it incorrectly, but one of the pre-reqs for this was a strong community which implies people knowing each other at minimum.
So would the initial steps towards this future also include cultivating more community with our neighbors?
Cause I'm imagining some conflict when people make a land trust for a community but they don't want "them" in this community.
Have you run into how any info on those communities handling that conflict?
I don't think a "community" has to be a "likeminded community." Here I'm using "community" as "people who live in a certain area." And they don't need to all agree on anything except that the land they all live on should be owned by and benefit all of them, not property developers or governments far away. That's more than enough common ground to establish a trust!
That said, I am highly in favor of cultivating more community with our neighbors, and think that's a valuable first step for taking action together. We do that by hosting block parties and hosting events on our porches for all of our neighbors. I've seen other people start "coffee clubs"—going door to door to invite people to stop by the front yard on Sunday mornings for coffee. These kinds of things can lead to community action. For example, a neighborhood near us got a bunch of the neighbors to contribute and buy an empty lot on their street and turn it into a swimming pool. In some neighborhoods, why not buy your town too?