jakke:

shorterexcerpts replied to your post: “A 2006 survey by the Metro Atlan…

More not-so-fun facts about my city: rich assholes in north Fulton county have been agitating about splitting the county into “north and south fulton” for years. And GA has more counties than any state besides TX. Despite not being that big.

What even is the point of a county, if it’s not doing efficiencies-of-scale type services for an area larger than a municipality (e.g. garbage trucks or snowplows or libraries)? Like, if there are two dozen counties in a single metro area, it’s clear that they’re not doing anything radically different than municipalities would be. So why not just abolish the counties and run everything through your municipal governments anyway?

When states were first set up with administrative subdivisions they didn’t have many transport links - no railroads, no canals, few navigable rivers between the frontier and centers of trade, few roads (native trails having been unpaved and often overgrown by the time settlers arrived in great number, and in any case never designed for wheeled traffic)

Up until the early 20th century, when railroads networked the national economy together, national income taxes were established, and the country entered a European war, the county was basically the highest level of government the average farmer (which was most citizens) would have contact with, with the exception of the post office and possibly the “revenuers” who attempted to enforce federal liquor taxes.

(Which were themselves kind of a proto-income tax - between the aforementioned lack of transport connections and the volume-reducing, value-adding effect of distilling, whiskey became both a major object and medium of trade in the currency-starved backcountry. This made liquor very cheap, and combined with the homestead rather than village settlement patterns meant the drinking culture was less “pints at the tavern, and singing songs with your friends” than “straight whiskey at home, and abusing your family”, which is why abstinence and prohibition had always been so popular among rural female-dominated institutions like the temperance movement and various churches)

Anyway yeah they’re still useful in rural areas and while some cities have reworked the system (New York City contains 5 counties, 1 for each borough; Portland’s “Metro” system is a level of government for the multi-county region), they largely survive because all the people tied into them, who are by definition people with influence and political expertise, stand to lose from their abolition.

And yeah one of the major uses of unconsolidated metropolitan governance is to allow people to participate in the urban economy without being fully subject to the governance of regional majorities, in a way that’s often racialized. One of the major tensions in American democracy, or rather democracy in any multicultural polity, has always been that the most popular policy is always to formalize the supremacy of the electorate’s ethnoreligious majority.