How to Pronounce Tiebout and More

The major problem with Tiebout funding is that it works for quasi-public goods but not redistribution, as your own posts on progressive taxation and Tiebout have pointed out - and the moderate economist's political consensus is built around making these the one and the same thing.

'We' deserve public goods because 'we' are fellow citizens, etc., and Tiebout destroys the illusion of common nationality and welcomes Balkanization.

To clarify this post a little bit further, Tiebout's model was used to demonstrate that mobility solved the "revealed preference" problem of public goods. The paper itself had little to do with competition among local governments where mobility constraints induced their efficiency, but rather efficiency was mostly achieved by households moving into districts where provision patterns matched their own preference levels (constrained somewhat by congestion costs around a fixed asset). Samuelson had previously given the impression the revealed preference could not be solved for public goods, and Tiebout pushed back with the argument that mobility patterns were (at least partially) a solution to the revealed preference problem.

Note also that the title Tiebout's seminal paper (A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures) was a direct parody of Samuelson's public good paper (A Pure Theory of Public Expenditures).

The original Tiebout article doesn't address mobility constraints producing local efficiency, but his 1961 article with Vincent Ostrom and Robert Warren does.

http://localgov.fsu.edu/readings_papers/Service%20Delivery/Ostrom_Tiebout_Warren_The_Organization_of_Government.pdf