Fire Safety
I have no doubt that there is room for savings in most fire departments. Their trucks seem more sparkly than could possibly be necessary. They seem to have more people on full time alert than the actual occurrence of dangerous fires makes necessary. Still this is a rather important service so I'll leave the total budget alone and just accept it.
TOTAL PER YEAR: $1,936,932,000
PER CAPITA PER YEAR: $226.53
TOTAL BURDEN PER CAPITA: $1,068.51 /year /person
In practice fire risk is strongly linked to architecture and activity. It thus follows that fire protection should be paid for by the same social unit that owns the architecture and regulates the activity.
An apartment complex pays for the whole building, the price is rolled into the rent. A office building owned by a company pays. Etc..
The fee for fire protection, like police protection, should be bundled with the concept of insurance. What people want is saftey from property and life loss so that's what the service should be. The fee would be higher for structures and activities which the fire department determines to be more risky.
The fire department would publish safety standards. The minimum would be required to buy the service. The recommended would provide a discount upon inspection.
If a fire breaks out in one structure and could spread to another those who are responsible are legally liable for the damages including the fire department response. If they paid for the service though that liability would be limited. Thus paying for the service would be almost necessary in terms of liability (in the same way that car or health insurance is almost necessary, law aside).
The fire department will be motivated to remain efficient by competing against private anti-fire measures, i.e. if they are very wasteful it would be come cheaper just to make your structure completely fire-proof. Yes it is possible, just expensive.
EMTs
EMS is actually part of the above fire saftey budget because in new york... well that's just something they do. So I will be perfectly justified in being rather light in this section because it has already been accounted for in a very real sense.
It does make sense to dispatch ambulances to any emergency just in case. In that sense it does make sense to associate them with other emergency services. However as far as paying for it, it should be strongly associated with other medical costs.
So I would propose that having an ambulance show up to any emergency should be part of an emergency response fee just as new york implies by having it be part of the fire department. However those ambulances would be idle most of the time, they would 'rent out' their service to medical organizations and it would simply be another medical cost.
I say this knowing this is actually how it already works, people get charged for getting carried by an ambulance and the health insurance takes care of it. Aside from the horrid inflation of all medical costs being caused by government subsidy this seems fairly efficient.
If the emergency response service becomes wasteful they could easily be kept in line by an efficient private ambulance service. (there should be a mechanism by which people can opt to buy fire insurance without the ambulance)
Roads & Public Transportation
$15,465,717,000 was appropriated for the entire state of new york in 2017. We can assume they spent most if not all of it.
I will divide by the whole state population as opposed to the city proper. The density of roads in the city is high but also less roads are needed in general because there is less 'useless' distance to cover. In any case there is no doubt that a square foot of asphalt in the city is utilized a hell of a lot more than in the countryside so dividing by the whole population will show a bias towards greater expense if anything.
$779.12 per capita bringing us to:
TOTAL BURDEN PER CAPITA: $1847.64 /year /person
To simply try to extract a fee from each person for that would be inane. There should be a clear delineation between new projects and maintenance.
Maintenance should be a pay-as-used fee (they call these 'tolls') based on the wear on the road (or else flat per vehicle). This is not likely to be a big problem to implement given the ever rising IT know-how. It can perhaps be extremly fine tuned in a city like new york, down to which avenue you favor.
A major part of the budget is new projects though, those should be paid for as a government project. Plans formulated, funds secured by donation or by offering licenses to use the road without tolls for X number of years. (like go fund me, but with legal protection).
For the public transport look at this handy chart (on page II-1):
The plan here is very simple, that pie chart that shows where the dollars came from should be "100% farebox revenue"
The chart showing expense by category should be a lot thicker in the "Non labor" area... you know in terms of buying and fueling busses, building and maintaining underground train networks etc...
is the kind of thing people would just not tolerate if they had a choice.
The fares would grow beyond the middle class and the whole thing would shut down until this wasteful gunk is cleaned out. Still I have no problem adding the farebox revenue as a per capita expense. I do think that you can run a mass transit system with that much when you aren't paying 19,000 people six figures.
TOTAL FARE: $6,271,000,000
FARE PER CAPITA: $733.41
TOTAL BURDEN PER CAPITA: $2,581.05 /year /person
Utilities (electric/water/sewage)
Care is needed here, the city does not provide free power and utilities right now. That is all already included in the cost of living (30k). The only price we are looking at here is government spending on infrastructure.
i.e. it's already voluntary and utilizes no tax money (at least not officially).
TOTAL WATER/SEWAGE: $1,450,101,000
PER CAPITA WATER/SEWAGE: $169.59
TOTAL BURDEN PER CAPITA: $2750.64 /year /person
Again it should be tied to actual usage where ever possible, as it already is in most places.
Poverty
Once again for the sake of simplicity I will simply assume that the DHS is the upper limit of how much it would cost to give people the opportunity to sleep somewhere other than the streets and eat something other than garbage. I have a strong suspicion that many 'compassionate' people on the left are more interested in getting these people to the voting booths rather than getting them jobs .
That is not important in this analysis since I am willing to accept this budget. I do think in a free system that government aid programs would have to prove their effectiveness to donors vs private charities or risk being defunded.
TOTAL FOR HOMELESS: $1,297,924,000
PER CAPITA FOR HOMELESS: $151.79
TOTAL BURDEN PER CAPITA: $2902.43 /year /person
So there we have it. Maybe New York wouldn't be the shining city on the hill if it had only the services I enumerated. But it wouldn't be chaos, it wouldn't be anarchy.
So what about the freeloader problem? I assert that the freeloader problem was almost fully mitigated in each category. A quick review:
Police: Insurance against criminal activity + warning survival mechanism of defunding a precinct. (moderate freeloader problem, a cultural taboo will probably form from cyclic close calls with insufficient police presence)
Fire Safety: Mitigate liability, insure onsite assets against fire damage (minimal freeloader problem because of 'horror' stories where someone has to payout big because a fire in their building spread)
EMT: Health insurance (zero freeloader problem)
Roads: Tolls and voluntary pledges before breaking ground (zero freeloader problem)
Public Transport: Fares actually pay for the service, if you want poor people to ride you buy them tickets (zero freeloader problem)
Power: You pay for what you use, profits are used by power authority to maintain infrastructure (zero freeloader problem)
Sewage/Water: You pay for the water you use, you pay a fixed fee for a certain drainage limit, profits used to maintain infrastructure (zero freeloader problem)
Poverty: Price not very high (by comparison), no freeloader problem because this is charity.
So we take the burden and divide by the disposable income.
$2902.43/$11,427 = 0.253 = 25.3%
On average as little as 1/4 could pay for these services if they had to. If half of people on average paid for these services they would still have half their disposable income.
Considering the only serious freeloader problem is the police this is quite plausible, simply put if anywhere close to a majority of people actually want to live in a dense city they will pay for the police. If 1/4 or less of the people want to live there with police protection the rest should get the hell out... and they would when they found themselves in precincts without police protection.
This analysis doesn't account for families explicitly but that is because they were factored out in the beginning. In a family some people don't have an income, but in reality the adults make much more than 33k per year. On average it is equivalent to the adults and children each making 33k per year.
This analysis does not account for wealth distribution. The rich are far more capable of offsetting freeloaders (by simply paying the freeloaders share). The poor are far less capable of offsetting freeloaders (as they can barely pay their own fair share).
The system could not tolerate many rich freeloaders, but it doesn't have to. Rich people (and companies) have the most to protect from aggression and will be the last to forgo the police protection layers and the insurance they provide.
If poor communities find police intervention counter-productive they need only stop paying and handle it themselves. It is my belief that there are many people in urban environments who have no good reason to be there. Urbanization is to allow for synergistic trading and energy efficiency. Rent controls and other wealth redistribution policies only serve to keep people around when they can't pay their own way. It would be a far better strategy to pay the same subsidies to relocate them to somewhere where their labor commands higher buying power.
