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Yes, as you pointed out then, roads are "tax-funded infrastructure everyone uses", but Wal-Mart uses them better than everyone else; the secret to Wal-Mart lies in its "warehouses on wheels" distribution model. I don't fault Wal-Mart for taking advantage of the infrastructure already in place to create an ingenious distribution system, but it is highly unlikely this distribution model would be cost-effective were it not for state-subsidized roads.
And I'm sure I don't need to remind you that Bob Poole and other Reason Foundation types have been arguing for congestion and toll based pricing models since before I was born, nor that Cato looks favorably upon gas taxes as an alternative to CAFE standards.
So why in the world would you grant Yglesias' point instead of correcting him on this? When libertarians call for privatizing the roads, we are labeled a bunch of anarchist loons (a label many of us wear proudly!); when we don't constantly harp on the roads issue, we are accused of being corporatist hacks. Damned if ya do...
Incidentally, the summer I worked in D.C., I chose to drive my car to work each day instead of taking the Metro. I parked illegally most days in metered spots without putting coins in the meter (inspired by Gary Becker), amassed a slew of parking tickets (though the total penalty was still less than if I had paid in full each day or used the pay parking lot a few blocks away), received a ticket for driving on the highway during morning rush-hour without a passenger, endured D.C. morning rush-hour, and curtailed my alcohol consumption after work - all to avoid the cattle-car that is public transportation, not to mention the multi-block hike from the Metro station to work while wearing a suit and tie.
Cigarettes : Man's mastery over fire :: Cars : Braveheart-ian FREEDOM!
An economist would say that you are a free rider: creating laws mandating that one pays for parking is meant to make it easier to find a place to park in exchange for money, and HOV lanes are made to reduce commute times in exchange for reducing the number of cars on the road. You didn't give up the bad thing to get the good thing by taking advantage of lax enforcement.
Of course, a normal person would call you a selfish dickhead who hates to be around poor people. These people would be off the mark, because they can't understand the exquisite calculus going into your commute.
I might have felt guilty violating the parking meter laws had the spaces ever been even close to fully occupied, but they never were. I think the most I ever saw was one other car parked on the same block, with 3-4 other spaces remaining empty. An economist would probably say the spots were over-priced since the market never cleared.
Strangely, I would feel extremely guilty parking in a handicapped space even if I believed with a high degree of certainty that it wouldn't be used otherwise. And I consider it extremely rude when I see others doing it. For some reason that social norm sticks for me in a way that regular metered parking doesn't. It may have something to do with the fact that I've spent the majority of my life in Atlanta, where parking is ubiquitous and rarely if ever rationed by price. It's rare to ever have to even parallel park, and a lot of people I know forgot how to do it after they passed their drivers' exam.
You have a better argument with the HOV lanes, although I didn't even realize there was a law until I got ticketed the first time. Admittedly, after receiving the ticket I continued to break the law, knowingly. Meh, no feelings of guilt. Again, as a counter-example, I do feel guilty driving in a normally marked HOV lane on the left side of the highway as a single passenger, just not when the entire highway turns into an HOV during rush-hour. Maybe if I lived in D.C. for longer the social norm would begin to develop for me?
I don't feel guilty free riding unless I'm actively depriving someone of something they would have gotten otherwise. For example, I use Wikipedia all the time but have never contributed. (I suppose I'm using up some bandwidth.) And I illegally pirate music and movies that I wasn't planning on buying anyway. I still pay to go see movies in the theater on occasion, and purchase the rare concert ticket or album if I appreciate the band.
I can understand the selfish dickhead part, I suppose, but not so much the "hates to be around poor people part." Of all the people entering D.C. each morning on either the Metro or the highway, I suspect that summer interns are in the lowest income brackets as individuals, and my family was in a lower income bracket than most of the other interns I met. I don't recall seeing very many poor people on the Metro in the morning; most were dressed in suits, carrying iPods, and looking all policy wonkish.
Despite your snark, you did make me realize how much the laws and social norms differ from state to state, so thanks for that. And I suppose urban density and city vs. suburb living has a lot to with the establishment of different social norms as well. For example, I remember noticing that in D.C., pedestrians are much more likely to observe the crosswalk signals even when no cars are coming, whereas in Atlanta, pedestrians pretty much ignore the signals at their convenience and jaywalk wherever they please.
Second, there is an issue of who actually benefits from the changes. A change to allow higher density housing for example benefits people who would move into the municipality to take advantage of the cheaper housing. It harms those who already live there in the form of lowered property values / aesthetic values. Or at least they often perceive it to lower those values. The problem is that the only people who get to vote in a municipality are the people who already live there. The potential new residents, who would have most reason to favour this example, don't get to vote for it.
It's pretty obvious that Matt would get what he wants (higher density) without a zoning code that mandates it. Suburban sprawl is a historical anomaly abetted by stupid zoning and cheap/subsidized transportation. In the absence of these things there's no reason to think that the high density that has characterized the vast majority of the history of urban living would not reassert itself. It's not like London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, etc. were developed and sustained by dint of liberal hippy interventionist zoning regulations. Reports of your oppression at the hands of Yglesian thugs are greatly exaggerated.
It does involve more responsibility (car payment, insurance, gas, etc.), but it allows you to go so many more places than public transport. I say this as a non-car owner and heavy user of public transportation.
Until we have teleportation technology, that will always be the case.
"What do you mean, other countries don't value the things our lawmakers heavily subsidise?"
I both recognize that suburbs are shaped by zoning regulations and enjoy them. I think after repealing them there would still be suburbs, since people have created them whenever they have had the wealth to do so.
Isn't it possible to simply like cars better than trains without it being a "libertarian preference"?
Hang on. This is the "you want everyone to move to Manhattan" straw man. Nobody is proposing confiscating your car and tearing up your road. (Unless it's the Sheridan Expressway.)
At every juncture a government has little choices to make. Give street parking away for free, or charge market rates, or force developers to build more car parking. Let people drive across a bridge for free or charge a toll. Widen the highway or leave it the size it is.
These are all issues where the theoretically-libertarian position lines up with the urbanist position. But there are a lot of Randall O'Tooles out there who instinctively side with the cars-uber-alles position.
The subsidies to cars are greatly exagerated and are far lower than any other form of transportation, see, e.g. Randal O'Toole's work on this subject at http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2007/03/19/ten-b...
In general, it isn't clear to me that life would bee very different in a libertarian paradise. As I understand, libertarians don't object to covenants running with the land, including covenants that establish homeowners' associations (or merchants' associations) with power to establish binding rules for properties subject to the covenant regime. If the whole country were blanketed by such associations, the land use rules in effect would be enforced by private civil actions rather than governmental actions, but the actual rules would be about the same as they are now.
First, and more meaningfully, cars provide much more individual liberty than trains and busses. You can take a car anywhere you want, whenever you want (or close enough as makes no difference).
With a bus or train, especially state-run ones, you go where the State wants to let you go, when it wants to let you go there.
The libertarian appeal of the former is obvious, no?
Secondly, I think it's more that given that we already have both subsidized roads and subsidized mass transit, most people focus on the "greater evil" both in terms of state control and in terms of expense (after all, if it was free and nobody was being oppressed by taxation to promote it, it would be far less of a libertarian evil!).
That and arguing for road privatization is a lot harder to manage - too many people reflexively assume it's just impossible to have private roads of any amount and quality; the rewards to arguing against them are lower per amount of effort than arguing against subsidized rail boondoggles, where the costs and failings are more obvious.
I've certainly seen academic libertarian arguments against road subsidies as well as rail and bus subsidies.
That was well put.
Given the false choice between state roads and state rail, I can see why a pragmatic libertarian would choose the more governmentally decentralized option of roads and zoning. That, at least, provides for a lower cost "right of exit" to which Kling was referring.
If that were the case, Southwest would have never taken off.
'We need only turn to the problems which arise in connection with land, particularly with regard to urban land in modern large towns, in order to realize that a conception of property which is based on the assumption that the use of a particular item of property affects only the interests of its owner breaks down. There can be no doubt that a good many, at least, of the problems with which the modern town planner is concerned are genuine problems with which governments or local authorities are bound to concern themselves. Unless we can provide some guidance in fields like this about what are legitimate or necessary government activities and what are its limits, we must not complain if our views are not taken seriously when we oppose other kinds of less justified "planning."'