Every person who wakes up in Berkeley holds a stack of rights that no Gilded Age fortune could have purchased. They are invisible because they are universal and unpriced. This page lists them in one place — and makes the case that a city government's real job is running the services that keep them real.
Most of these attach to any person standing inside the city limits — resident or visitor, citizen or newcomer. Where a claim is less certain, it says so. Tell me where I'm wrong and I'll fix it.
Price the inventory above as a private estate: a guaranteed workshop, a 120,000-acre back garden, standing access to every record and meeting of your government, an enforceable interest in your home, free schooling for your children, the legal power to write municipal law by petition, a coastline that cannot be fenced against you, and the right to say absolutely anything about the people in charge. No Gilded Age fortune bought that combination. The magnate had the acreage; he did not have the warrant requirement, the guaranteed counsel, or the antibiotics.
Two perceptual errors hide this wealth. We price things by scarcity, so universal goods register as worthless. And an unexercised right is imperceptible — indistinguishable from its absence. Nobody experiences the Public Records Act until they request a record; the Tool Lending Library is an abstraction until the day you need a demolition hammer.
Perception here is an activity, and it doubles as maintenance. Records requests get slow when nobody files them; public comment gets perfunctory when nobody shows up; commons get enclosed when nobody walks them. The luxury is real, but it is the kind that must be used to be owned. Try one week of it:
You end the week factually no richer and perceptibly wealthy. Every item was already yours on Monday.
Fifty years ago the economist Arthur Okun drew the line that this page stands on. A society, he argued, deliberately keeps two domains: a domain of rights, where the market is forbidden — one person one vote, equal justice, free speech, none of it for sale — and a domain of the market, where efficiency does the work of making everyone better off. The art of governing is keeping each in its lane and doing each one well.
Everything in the inventory above lives in the rights domain. But every one of those rights is delivered by an organization — a library system, a parks district, a clerk's office, a police force — and organizations run on the efficiency side of the line. The rights are only as real as the operations behind them. A records request answered in eleven months is a right on paper. A library with cut hours is a smaller commons. A pool that closes is a right you used to have.
That is why a council member's job description is unglamorous on purpose: verify what the city's money actually buys, insist that claimed results be measured against real ones, and treat every wasted dollar as a withdrawal from the commons that makes the luxury above real. Rights set what the city owes every person. Efficiency determines whether it can pay.