Free Cities.(relationship between a free market system and cities)

Contrary to modern political assumptions, the dense city, not the quiet office suburb, is the facilitator of market capitalism.

Throughout history, cities have been the creator of wealth, the breeder of genius, and the market for art, technology, and science. In fact, the words "city" and "civilization" have the same root. To socialist reformers like Eugene Debs, the city is what had to be dispersed for a revolution to take hold. Debs said "regeneration will only come with depopulation-when socialism has relieved the congestion and released the people and they spread out over the country and live close to the grass."(1)

Capitalism needs the city as much as the city needs capitalism. The city cannot thrive without capitalism, and capitalism cannot be prevented in a city. Capitalism, trade, and commerce created and shaped cities as dense environments where everything is within reach. Being together allows for an efficient distribution of goods, and services, ready access to labor and capital, and an easy exchange of ideas and knowledge.

The suburb and the congested highway is a manner of development in-between civilized and nomadic life just as today's economy is in-between flee-markets and welfare state. While markets have adapted to the suburban form, it is none-the-less the creation of the government.

The form of the city did not change from urban to suburban because of new products competing in a flee-market; it changed because people, companies, and interest groups used the government and the public interest to favor an industry and subsidize private homes, commercial establishments, and developments.

The highways have been successful and popular because they have introduced technology to the economy, even if it's not the technology which would have prevailed if the market were flee. Unlike urban development subsidies which exert control over every economic aspect contained within a given area, highway subsidies only stimulate and entice developers, and the market, to act in a certain way. But they are no less harmful.

Rather than suffering from a case of out-dated technology and outmoded environments, cities have been the victim of government steering and stabilization efforts pulling at them in any number of directions. It could strangely be argued that the cities that work today have received huge government subsidies to counteract the effect of other huge government subsidies which perhaps restored them to some mirror image of the state they could have been in if the market had provided it's own course for urban growth. In other words, in urban America, highway subsidies created a need for transit subsidies and subsidized suburban investment created a need for urban development grants and programs.