Posts tagged transportation

Monday Lazy Linking

Monday Lazy Linking

  • Mutual aid opportunity. Shawn P. Wilbur, Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule (2011-05-06). You'll find a new ChipIn widget in the sidebar of the blog (or on ChipIn), to support Laughing Horse Books, one of Portland, Oregon's few remaining independent bookstores, and a radical, collective-run bookstore/music venue/meeting space for 25 years now. All the little things that tend to snowball when a business... (Linked Saturday 2011-05-07.)

  • In Defense of Flogging - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education. chronicle.com (2011-05-07). "Certainly my defense of flogging is more thought experiment than policy proposal. I do not expect to see flogging reinstated any time soon. And deep down, I wouldn't want to see it. And yet, in the course of writing what is, at its core, a quaintly retro abolish-prison book, I've come to see the benefits of wrapping a liberal argument in a conservative facade. If the notion of tying people to a rack and caning them on their behinds à la Singapore disturbs you, if it takes contemplating whipping to wake you up and to see prison for what it is, so be it! The passive moral high ground has gotten us nowhere." - Peter Moskos (Linked Saturday 2011-05-07.)

  • Marie Curie. xkcd.com (2011-05-08). (Linked Monday 2011-05-09.)

  • Bin Laden reaction roundup. John, Blagnet.net (2011-05-08). I have been much more interested in the various and sundry reactions, mainly from Americans, to Osama bin Laden’s killing than to the news itself. The whole situation ought to inspire quite a bit of mixed feelings from any libertarian, and even from any sensible, sympathetic human being. Notwithstanding the... (Linked Monday 2011-05-09.)

  • Urban Airport of the Future (1926) Matt Novak, Paleofuture Blog (2011-05-07). The fine people at Popular Mechanics recently published a book that deserves a prominent place on every retrofuturist's bookshelf. The Wonderful Future That Never Was by Gregory Benford looks at technological predictions that appeared in the pages of Popular Mechanics from 1903 until 1969. The prediction below was an attempt to... (Linked Monday 2011-05-09.)

  • No Laissez Faire There. Sheldon Richman, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2011-05-06). (This article is based on remarks delivered at the meeting of the Association of Private Enterprise Education in April.) Friends of the free market tend to see the Gilded Age, roughly 1870-1890, as the closest thing in history to a laissez-faire economy. In some respects that is true — but... (Linked Monday 2011-05-09.)

Subsidized Order

Here’s a recent paint-by-numbers column on Spontaneous Order by John Stossel. It’s a passable introduction to the concept, and I will say that the opening illustration of spontaneous order in an ice-skating rink is nicely chosen. Then there is this:

At last January’s State of the Union, President Obama said America needs more passenger trains. How does he know? For years, politicians have promised that more of us will want to commute by train, but it doesn’t happen. People like their cars.

—John Stossel, Spontaneous Order, in The Freeman (May 2011)

It would be more accurate to say that people like their cars when they come with a massively subsidized network of government roads and a government-imposed glut of subsidized parking spaces.

Some subsidized trains cost so much per commuter that it would be cheaper to buy them taxi rides.

—John Stossel, Spontaneous Order, in The Freeman (May 2011)

As if subsidized highways and parking had no costs!

People’s cars are useless without this subsidized and monopolistic infrastructure, which is in artificially great supply due to the government’s monopolization of land use, which the people in question have to pay for, whether they use it or not, and which the people in question do then get to use at little or no marginal cost above what they were forced to pay in taxes. I wonder how much people would be liking their cars if alternatives weren’t locked out by government’s use of eminent domain and land-use mandates, or if people were free to pay — or to withdraw — the real marginal cost of driving, rather than the deformed structure of costs that government’s Infrastructure Monopoly has produced.

This is of course no argument for the desirability of ridiculous government-fueled high-speed heavy rail boondoggles, or any other sort of government funding of mass transit. Those are stupid too, and guaranteed to stay stupid as long as they are enacted through the political means. It’s not even an argument against the desirability of cars. But American car culture is no example of spontaneous order emerging from revealed preferences in a market free-for-all. It’s a perfect example of pervasive, intensive, map-redrawing government planning, from the repeatedly bailed-out, sometimes government-owned auto makers down to the parking lot of your nearest strip mall. The only way to find out how people will like to travel in a free market is to leave people free to experiment — and the current massive exertion of force to channel land into roads and parking lots, and wealth out of people’s pockets and into fancy new roads for the benefit of downtown merchants, billionaire sports team owners, and Wal-Mart distribution centers is anything but a free experiment or a spontaneous social process.

There Is No Right Way To Manage a Subsidy

Randall O’Toole, The Antiplanner (26 April 2011):

The second problem with life-cycle budgeting is that its advocates want some sort of federal law imposing it on transportation agencies. … Just what those agencies need: more red tape consuming scarce transportation dollars and delaying needed transportation projects.

The real problem with federal transportation spending is that Congress has split federal funds into 40 or 50 pots of money and greatly restricted how state and local agencies can spend from each pot. Better incentives are the solution, not more bureaucracy. Congress should give state and local governments more flexibility in how to spend the money, combined with incentives (see pp. 7-8) to insure the money is effectively spent.

Actually, no. The real problem with federal transportation spending is that Congress spends other people’s money on subsidizing transportation infrastructure. Politically-appropriated incentives offer no more of a solution than bureaucracy, because there is no political solution to the problem. The only way to determine where people need roads, or rails, or planes, or bicycle lanes, or alternative uses of scarce resources that have nothing to do with transportation or infrastructure, is to leave us — people, not agencies — free to experiment and work it out ourselves. There’s no way to approximate that by jiggering the way that subisides are allocated because there’s no way to simulate the effects of free and mutual exchange while leaving political ownership and political control intact. Unless and until you dissipate the control, all you have is a different style for managing the subsidy. You can’t fix the damage of taxation with more flexible or efficient allocation of the spoils.

What Congress should do is go home, give back the scarce transportation dollars they stole, and take up an honest living.

Wednesday Lazy Linking