One of my big interests is the area of urban planning and design. My present love of cities would have been totally unpredictable even ten years ago. I was raised outside of a small city of about 26,000 on an ample piece of land where children didn’t have to worry about how loud they (we) were and we still drank well water (as my mom still does today).

Something changed somewhere in the last couple of years, though, after living in Columbia for a good amount of time. I lived on campus, and downtown was always just a short walk away, and I loved being able to go to the places I would have gone anyway without having to drive. Most of the time I lived on campus, my car hardly moved. Everything I needed was close by. That’s where I finally realized the ideals of city living—a far stretch from my youth when we had to drive a few miles just to buy a loaf of bread. And in my ever-increasing environmental awareness, the concept of not driving definitely appeals to me.

Where does Libertarianism fit into this? Soon, I promise.

See, now that I love the city lifestyle so much, I want to live in the city, where all the happening stuff is. Unfortunately, many cities are not the kinds of places people want to live anymore. They do not function the way they were originally designed, with good public transportation, tight-knit neighborhoods, and the old corner drug stores. And that is a real shame. So I have been reading everything I can on the subject of America's cities--their decline, what went wrong, and what it would take to make them liveable again.

The last book I read concerning cities and urban planning was Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival, by Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio. The basic premise behind the book is that, after decades of urban flight and an almost national belief in the evils of America’s inner cities—places of intense crime, poverty, decay, despair, and hopelessness, many cities are turning around and actually becoming attractive places to live again. And it’s about time. The book examines what has been happening in cities across the nation in the past twenty years to make this turnaround possible, and postulates on what can continue that trend (and even speed it along). It is one of the best books I have read on the subject, because instead of taking the view that one thing is responsible for the decline of cities and will be the key to their revival, it looks at many variables that have to work together for success to be realized.

Chapter 11 of this book is titled ‘The “Third Way” in City Hall,’ the third way being a phrase taken from Tony Blair’s campaign with the New Labor Party for Prime Minister. This third way was conceived as a fusion, or middle ground, between orthodox Toryism and welfare-state socialism. Bill Clinton had a similar ideal, but his concept of “triangulation” wasn’t as catchy. However, the idea of a middle-ground between two major schools of thought had already been born and working wonders in American cities by visionary mayors who stopped thinking along party lines and started thinking—get this—about the good of their cities. And it wasn’t such a bad idea to do something different. Years of business as usual by politicians was not helping cities at all—it was actually making things worse. Things such as subsidizing suburbanization and building ever-growing highway systems along with the “grim immovables” of welfare, public schools, and public housing had put cities in their dire positions, and maintaining the status quo would not help matters.

So what has worked? The cities that have made tremendous comebacks, like New York City, Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago, have experimented with decentralizing control of public services, and even privatizing them and allowing competition, which has resulted in better quality and lower costs; rethinking school systems by allowing charter schools and vouchers, steps that might lead to the breakdown of the monopoly public schools now have in inner cites and is currently a huge deterrent to middle-class families moving there; they are redesigning public housing and not lumping poor people with other poor people, and indeed many have made the case that there is no longer a need for public housing as it is today, that the market can take care of people better than the government (imagine that).

These are just some of the steps that are improving center cities, and of course not all of the improvement is due to city halls, but to local private, non-profit groups who have vested interests in their communities and really started the process of turning cities around in the first place. But in the cities where mayors have worked with such groups, the changes are dramatic. In other cities (unfortunately one being our near-and-dear St. Louis), change has been slow. But these mayors, who “blurred the lines between Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal” and “do not want bugger checks from Washington; they want the freedom to solve their cities’ problems in their own way”, and who more and more are leaning to smaller governments and increased support of private services taking care of the problems—do they not sound like Libertarians?

Somewhere between conservative and liberal, smaller governments, privatization in former government-provided services, and a belief that the market will take care of itself? Sounds Libertarian to me. So why do they have to hide behind the guise of a so-called “Third Way”? It just seems sad that politicians cannot associate with the party that actually seems to most fit their ideologies. If more people knew that the cities that have improved the most over the last twenty years have been guided by Libertarian beliefs, imagine the gain in popularity the party could realize. Too bad people just don’t seem to realize who they really are, or are too scared to be associated with a third party. In my opinion, most people realize that neither Republicans nor Democrats have had the answers to our biggest problems, but they also do not know that the Libertarian thought can be the answer because the biggest possible proponents for the cause are not recognized, nor do they recognize themselves, as Libertarians.

But we know better.

No, it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm single. And no, I do not believe that marriage itself is a bad institution. Rather, I think that marriage is a meet, right and salutary estate for couples who desire it. I have no problem with the institution or marriage, per se. My problem, then, is with the institutionalization of marriage by the government. Simply put, we need no government recognition of marriages, nor do we need government limitations on marriages. Moreover, we certainly do not need government taxation of marriages. In fact, if we were to eliminate the so-called marriage penalty from our tax code, we could do away with government certification of marriages altogether. (Of course, as a libertarian, I ma in favor of eliminating the income tax altogether, but that's a topic for an altogether separate article.)

In lieu of marriages, I propose that we reduce the legal status of marriage to nothing more than contract law. (Notably, the government issued marriage certificate is, itself, little more than a contract, with needless bureaucracy and overhead attached.) I could, for example, draft a contract with any person or persons, for the purpose of establishing an exclusive domestic partnership, with all rights, responsibilities and privileges entailed by such an arrangement. While I, personally, would desire to enter into such a partnership only with a single female on a presumably permanent basis ("till death do us part"), I understand and expect that others would not want to place such a limitation on this contracted domestic partnership. Such a reduction of marriage to contract law would allow for domestic partnerships between members of the same sex, among groups of more than two persons, less than two persons (e.g., a self-imposed vow of celibacy, which would be foreseeable for a variety of reasons), on a time-limited basis, with a non-exclusivity clause, and any other permutation you may like. Or, it may allow such partnerships with any permutations you do not like, as what happens behind closed doors of another person's home is not your business anyway. (Who may and may not enter into such a binding contract is, again, a separate topic for another article. For the time being, I will limit such a contract to "consenting adults," i.e., those who are not dependent on others, such as parents. Further distinctions could almost certainly be drawn, which I will not elaborate upon here.)

Lest anyone worry that such contracts would become costly, I point to the marriage tax as an example of just how costly marriage under our current system already is. In addition, I foresee a "standard domestic partnership contract," not unlike a standard lease, which varies very little from realtor to realtor. The existent of such a standard form for such partnership contracts would assure that couples (or groups or individuals) wishing to enter into this estate would not incur exorbitant legal costs. I also foresee those who enter into such an estate reaping a financial gain from such a contract, in the form of reduced costs of health and life insurance and other services that are generally made available to married couples at a cost lower than would be available to two separate individuals.

Some may be concerned about how such domestic partnerships would influence such matters as health insurance. "I don't want to pay my premiums to an insurance provider who provides service to polygamists," someone may object. Morally, this is certainly a viable objection. There are many such domestic partnership arrangements that would certainly violate the morals of many (and, in some cases, the majority of) Americans. This, however, still does not make the existence of such partnerships the concern of such morally minded Americans. Just as today Americans have the freedom to select insurance providers who do not provide benefits for abortion services, there would certainly be no shortage of insurance providers who would cater to this large segment of the population by providing insurance to individuals and to couples in "traditional" domestic partnerships only.

This freedom of association would extend, not only to insurance providers, but to religious affiliations as well. Same-sex and multiple-partner domestic arrangements will never be accepted by many religious bodies. Under the current system, however, should such partnerships be "legalized" (i.e., granted the same legal status as opposite-sex marriages), such bodies could eventually find themselves forced into accepting such arrangements that are contrary to their doctrinal positions. For example, a church may wish to excommunicate a homosexual couple who practice against the teachings of that church, but may face certain obstacles to doing so, on the grounds of the legal status of that partnership. Agree or disagree with the legitimacy of such an excommunication, the principle of freedom of association still holds. Such a church should be free to choose who may (and who may not) be a member and have the privileges of membership in that private organization. On the contractual basis I propose, churches would have the option of recognizing, for religious purposes, certain partnership arrangements, while rejection others without concern for the potential of any future legal entanglements. (Churches could, for example, recognize as "valid" only those domestic partnerships that have been confirmed by a public religious ceremony.)

Sadly, even in our society that is so heavily biased toward these traditional domestic arrangements, many marriages do end before death do the couple part. Such endings are rarely clean and tidy, but rather almost always quite messy and painful. Replacing marriage with domestic partnership contracts ensures that, at least insofar as the division of property is concerned, such proceedings would be somewhat simplified. (In no way do I mean to imply that there is any way to make divorce entirely painless.) Just as in the case of a prenuptial agreement, couples would be free to make agreements on how such situations would be handled ahead of time, in anticipation of the occurrence of this sad but common possibility. For example, a couple may agree that they will split all assets according to respective salaries, or they may prefer an arrangement that favors the innocent party by awarding a majority (by some pre-defined ratio) of assets to that member who did not breach the domestic contract. Such breaches could, according to the terms of the agreement, consist of behaviors such as infidelity, domestic abuse, substance abuse, negligence of parental duty, etc. (In such cases, matters of child custody could also be pre-determined to favor the innocent party to the dispute.) Such matters could, then, be settled by much more easily arbitration rather than by means of the court system.

There are, then, no further grounds upon which the continuation of state-sponsored marriages may be justified. The principle of "caveat emptor" would prevail; those who voluntarily enter into such arrangements would do so with full knowledge of the consequences, not only in terms of the rights and responsibilities of the arrangement, but also in terms of the conditions of its termination. The state would have no role to play in such matters whatsoever, which is as it should be. After all, such matters really are nobody's business, and government involvement (with its associated taxation to support the bureaucrats who oversee such matters on the government's behalf) wrongly makes such private matters everybody's business.