The most important thing blue cities need to understand and internalize is that anarchy is not a form of welfare. Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder — restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on — represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want. But in fact, permissiveness toward the behaviors that create urban disorder destroy more value than they redistribute. When you don’t make people pay for public transit, you scare people off the train, thus causing the train to go bankrupt. Pretty soon neither the rich nor the poor have a train, and everyone is screwed. This is the tragedy of the commons.
