Libertarians and the Noncoercion Principle

Great Debates
241

You mean no reliable means of seizing rights-of-way for future construction? Why don’t we seize your house? Bet it’d make a nice road. And bet you wouldn’t mind a bit of sacrifice for the public good, right?

Well, Spiritus, like I’ve said before, there’s just oodles o’ stuff from that little site. Here’s another:

He points out that road usage does not follow the market forces that would mitigate road maintenace and traffic congestion. People use the roads at will, not reflecting the status of any demand, regardless of the road capacity. The supply runs thin, not allowing for efficient use of the infrastucture. Peak times only slow the city to a noisy crawl, a reflection upon the lack of capacity. Furthermore, at night or in off-peak hours enormous highways lay barren, testament that the highway administration overbuilt to meet an occasional peak in traffic.

Equilibrium can only be achieved through the market forces. Tolls at peak time could reflect the demand, charging more than other times of less demand.

Think about it: do you pay the same rate for a movie Saturday night as you would on a Tuesday afternoon? Of course not. Similarly, one should pay more for travel on peak hours of 7:00-7:50 am and 5:00-5:30 pm. Trucking firms would recognize the cost of travel at those times and would keep slow vehicles off the highways at that time.

Does a restaurant owner continually maintain his or her work force to fulfill an occasional increase in business? No. The capacity is reduced by having less employees during slow business periods, saving the owner money in wages. During peak times he or she may take reservations, ensuring the smooth flow of customers.

Highway systems and road building have only answered the call for increased capacity by building yet more roads and adding more lanes. The system does not take full advantage of the facilities it does have.

Walter Block, in his 1980 article in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, shows that merely asking employers to stagger work hours won’t solve the traffic problem. Some jobs cannot simply be shifted to unusual hours. He continues that mass transit has never paid for itself and is not a viable alternative. Mass transit requires massive subsides, and it still can’t compete with subsidized, public roads, pay-at-the-pump system. Mass transit offers the vast inconvenience of having to ride a slower transit system that cannot tailor itself to one’s travel needs.

By privatizing the roads, we could get rid of another repressive culture brought by government interference. Our current policy does not take into account the way land is used. Sprawl costs to much in excessive infrastructure ostensibly supported by, you guessed it, the taxpayers. If one wants to live far from services and away from other, that individual should pay for it.

This is feasible with today’s technology. Bar code scanners, radio tracking, and other automated systems may collect tolls without any wait. Users would get a bill at the end of the month. Individual responsiblity and the liability of the owners would keep the roads safe, by prohibiting some bad drivers or those with a drinking and driving problems off of the roads. Noise pollution could be identified at the source, and the owners of the roads would have to abate the noise or suffer the consequences of a lawsuit by adjacent tenants.

Would your price to travel go up? If you live in a smug, distant, little suburb, it would. You would pay the true costs of the privilage of travel. Although the current pay-at-the-pump systems work with the blind cost of highway maintenance, it doesn’t reflect the true price of unlimited mobility.

Anyone interested in more of this terrific idea may read more about it in the works of Walter Block.
“Free Market Transportation: Denationalizing the Roads” Journal of Libertarian Studies, summer 1979, vol. 3 no. 2, pp 209-38
“Public Goods and Externalities: The Case of Roads” Journal of Libertarian Studies, spring 1983, vol. 7 no. 1, pp 1-34
“Congestion and Road Pricing” Journal of Libertarian Studies, summer 1980, vol. 4 no. 3, pp. 299-330

242

[Sigh] yourself.
It’s a shame that lengthy article didn’t have anything whatsoever to do with the question of road-building and eminent domain in a libertarian society. If I recall that was what the post was about.

Somehow it’s not unexpected though.

243

Yes, the post was about eminent domain. And I read through your endless post, Lib, up to the lovely slander of Albert Gallatin, at which point I decided you were arguing with yourself on several fronts.

One front was that the means of determining rights-of-way for roads discussed up to that point involved (a) roads as public commons, or (b) governmental ‘coercion’ by several means, both of which are contrary to your philosophy/context/whatever. Even private turnpikes today necessarily involve governmental ‘coercion’ through eminent domain to secure the right-of-way.

Another is your ridiculous statement:

I’m fairly smart. So are you. There are smart people who have argued your side of the issue. There are smart people who’ve argued mine. One of them is the only man mentioned on that page you linked to when you hyperlinked ‘men’, Thomas Jefferson.

After all, when Gallatin made his arguments that your site spoke in such wonderfully slanted terms about, he was acting on behalf of Jefferson, as a member of Jefferson’s cabinet and one of his closest advisors.

The Jefferson presidency is an excellent model for activist government. I’m a big fan of his.

A third front in which you argue against yourself (in a kind of meta-way) is by your means of argument. Rather than attempt to make a concise case for the point you’re arguing, you’ve gone with an argument to authority (‘a lot of smart people have agreed with me, so you must really be dumb’ was certainly the way I read your rather insulting little post, for which I considered the source), then you laid down an enormous post consisting of 27 screens’ full of C&Ping.

Why the fuck should anyone read through a post like that? If you can’t be bothered to summarize it, or be selective, or whatever, that’s just intellectual laziness: rather than rebut a point on your own, with appropriate quotations and links, you throw a pile of articles at us as if to say, “Here. There’s a rebuttal somewhere in here.” When I hadn’t found a hint of the beginnings of such a rebuttal, after reading ten or twelve screens of text, I assumed you didn’t really have one other than, “Well, my ideas must be right, because they’re the ideas I believe in.”

I don’t know which of us is smarter, Lib, and it really doesn’t matter. But I seem to be fairly good at coming up with my own positions, and developing my own arguments for those positions, in my own words.

The mark of a truly great mind isn’t whether you’re right or wrong. It’s how well you can weasel out of a jam. - Unca Cecil

244

Rt:

At what point did I snooze during that article, and miss the eminent domain stuff.

I kinda thought the question of roads pertained towards seizing property to place a road.

Except for a history of roadbuilding, and the mention of some meandering roads in rural areas, I saw no conclusion as to how this issue should be dealt with.

245

Sorry for the confusion, Scylla. I thought you had been referring back to my previous post, and I was confirming that that post had been about eminent domain. That subject didn’t come up in the part of Lib’s endless C&P that I had the patience to wade through, and who knows if it ever did.

246

Lib - I might add that the question of privatizing existing roads is completely beside the point. Such roads still have relied on either eminent domain, or right-of-way determined by public use, for their initial existence.

My contention is that, without one or the other, you don’t get many roads to begin with, and the few you get aren’t likely to go anywhere useful.

The mark of a truly great mind isn’t whether you’re right or wrong. It’s how well you can weasel out of a jam. - Unca Cecil

247

No problemo