Private Communities Provide Better: The Villages, Florida Case Study

Who’s gonna build the roads? Provide the utilities? Who’s gonna protect us?
That’s the question everyone asks when you talk about getting rid of government, and it is very hard to mentally get to the next step in those challenges people have to libertarian thoughts, because of cognitive dissidence. It is hard to untrain the mind of people to stop thinking that only government can provide certain services. The natural reaction is that the private sector cannot provide them.

When thinking about these questions you must ask yourself, “what service is the government providing?” After you ask that question, you can then come up with a few reasonable ways that service may be provided in the private sector. You can bet that someone will build upon your ideas and improve that service, or come up with a better way to provide that service than the one you came up with. Case in point, The Villages, Florida. America’s largest retirement community, which is completely privately run, with neighborhood associations that do the “government” in each community. It is as close to “libertarian utopia” as you’ll find in America with privately build roads, schools, water treatment, and downtown public areas. It also has enough golf course to keep even the most avid golfer busy for a year.

Here is an aerial picture of the entire area of The Villages:

Zooming in you can see that they have many stores, even hospitals on property: