Libertarianism, in its purest form, could arguably be called an enemy of infrastructure. If the government is disabled and left a shallow, broke, impotent shell, then exactly who will build the roads, bridges, and public works that allow our society, and economy, to function? (If your stock answer is “The private sector! To hell with government!” then we’ve got about a library of stuff for you to read. Start here. Or here.)
The Reason Foundation, ultimate libertarian think tank, recently released a manifesto about U.S. infrastructure entitled “Restoring Trust in the Highway Trust Fund.” The full text was read and dissected by Willy Staley in a column for Next American City.
No surprise, the report is a dogmatic argument for reorganizing the surface transit bill according to the staunch principles of libertarianism. In other words, there would be not a cent given for public transit, bike paths, “livability” initiatives, or anything else having to do with sustainability.
According to their reasoning, the Highway Trust Fund is in such dire straits because it has been diverted from its original purpose when it was established in 1956 — to pay for the new Interstate system. Beginning in 1970, HTF funds were authorized to pay for transit, and since then it’s been all downhill from there. Nowadays, urban transit, bikeways, scenic trails, and other public programs eat up around one-quarter of all federal highway user tax revenues.
Sound like a somewhat reasonable argument? Well, there’s more. As Staley notes:
The Reason Foundation believes that by going back to the pre-1970 model will free up enough money to keep the Interstate system afloat, and that with minor increases in state fuel taxes, states will be able to maintain their own roads better without costly federal requirements like—no kidding—”mandates for safety belt usage, minimum drinking age and maximum blood-alcohol levels, Davis-Bacon labor requirements, Buy America requirements, various affirmative action mandates and transportation planning requirements.”
So yeah. Seat belt laws? Who needs ‘em? (Answer: We do. Desperately.) And as for the alcohol and BAC arguments, it’s a case of res ipsa loquitur — the wrongness of those points speaks for itself. [SButtonZ button="digg"]
Finally, Staley uncovered this doozie:
They cite [a] Transportation Research Board report that argues for taxing—or “charging”—drivers by Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), instead of charging the federal gas tax. Given that cars’ fuel economy is on the rise, it might become necessary to switch to a VMT model to capture enough revenue to keep the Trust Fund afloat. Unlike gasoline, which has distinct points of dispensation, VMT are a bit harder to calculate. And any workable way of collecting this tax would either be too invasive (some sort of government-installed odometer) or too expensive (a Turnpike-like system of toll booths every few miles) for anyone so interested in a users-pay model to bother with.
So we should stop paying a federal gas tax, and instead allow the government to install monitors in our cars to see where/how much we drive? That’s not very libertarian of them now is it?
Image: Courtesy DOE
Oh, well if you say so, thats as good as actually proving it.
Scatter: fine, you can do it by looking at deaths per 100 million vehicle-km. The study I linked to in my third comment (August 26, 2 am) shows a consistent multi-decade trend for a reduction in traffic deaths per 100 million vehicle-km. It shows a similar trend for the US, one that’s continued to this day regardless of seat belts.
But even the original link I gave is useful: it shows the temporary increase in pedestrian fatalities, which is in line with the predictions of the risk compensation theory.
Colin: I’m talking specifically about libertarian organizations, or organizations that libertarians often refer to. Those could be said to constitute libertarianism, just like the position papers of Brookings and CAP/CEPR, the editorials of The New Yorker and The Nation, and the writings of Paul Krugman could be said to constitute the economic positions of American liberalism. I wouldn’t fault someone for saying “Liberals claim X” when X is in fact claimed by most leading liberals. If I disagreed I would quote important liberals who disagree, or explain where my position differs from that of American liberalism.
El Kabong:
You said the Interstate system is a relic, which implies an antique or otherwise outdated oddity that is kept around for mainly sentimental value. I only try to point out that “re-purposed” (now used for business rather than military concerns) or “re-imagined” (revising its goals and forward direction of its development) is not the same as being an outdated relic. Also you said it was for airplanes, but I digress…
I think you are confusing the Interstate system (as a whole) with the idea of urban interstates. It’s true they were never meant to be the preferred method of urban commuters and they are not particularly good at that. As you said, they were meant to move materials (initially military, now EVERYTHING else in our economy) quickly and efficiently around the country. The cities of the U.S. are the vital organs, and the interstate system is the lifeblood that sustains them. Imports come from overseas to our coasts, and they need to be brought inland. Crops are grown most efficiently in the rural midwest, and need to migrate towards the coasts (and abroad) where most people live. Certain areas of the country produce goods that are desired and needed in other areas. Interstates facilitate that trade. Everyone benefits from that, especially those in cities, because people and countries are made richer by trade. We trade with other cities, other states, and other countries for our resources not out of spite or out of some suburbanite conspiracy to destroy cities, but because they do it cheaper than if we did it ourselves.
You say the users should have to pay an appropriate use tax on it, but that is the very essence of the Highway Trust Fund. As others in this thread have commented, that fund has been re-purposed over time to fund projects not related to Highway development and upkeep (e.g., transit). (Also, it has been used as a stick to beat down states who do not pass the “right” seat belt or drunk driving laws.) So how are we to determine the real cost of upkeep (and thus, the appropriate use tax), and furthermore what guarantee do we have that this new use tax will stay dedicated to highway costs, if history has shown that the money gets diverted to other projects anyway?
Well i think your read on both libertarian organizations and libertarianism generally is incorrect. But its obvious im not going to convince you of that.
Regardless of seatbelts or because of seatbelts? Continuation of a trend doesn’t mean that there is no effect because the trend could well have flattened out without it.
I don’t doubt risk compensation, all I’m saying is that John Adams has definitely not come up with a watertight argument here and I remain very sceptical of his views on the impact of seat belt laws.
Certainly to suggest that “each year since 1983 the seat belt law continues to deserve credit for the deaths of vulnerable road users, who but for the law would still be with us” (when in fact the trend returns to a best fit line within a couple of years) strikes me as being wide of the mark.
Dan H: the original arguments for building intercity road networks in the US were about moving people, not freight. This includes the Interstate network, which was sold as a defense bill late in the process but was for the preceding decades designed to get people in and out of cities. Only rural branch roads were intended to move freight; those were supposed to help farmers get their goods to multiple railheads, forcing the railroads to compete and lowering shipment rates.
Scatter: the trend is logarithmic, so flattening doesn’t really make sense. More to the point, if there had been flattening, it would have come about gradually, instead of just kicking in in 1983. It would have decreased the reduction in deaths per VMT, and would have been noticeable in the 1970s.
Adams’ quote about deaths of vulnerable road users is somewhat exaggerated, but it’s not that wide off the mark. Pedestrian deaths did go up after 1983, out of proportion to road deaths. The return to trend took a while – a few years is just how long it took for the number to go back down to early 1980s levels.
Libertarianism is the belief that personal freedom should be maximized. It has NOTHING to do with infrastructure. What the author should have said is that MINARCHISM is the enemy of infrastructure.
Minarchism ≠ Libertarianism
please try to be less ignorant, thank you.
“carlivar Says:
August 25th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
“Or will the Libertarians finally be happy when you can pop open a beer and hand it to the drunk teenager in the back seat who’s not wearing a seat belt as you drive along a badly-maintained state highway cut through an existing neighborhood or wetland area? Is that where all this nonsense is headed?”
Wow. That’s an impressive straw man you’ve created. Is that the way it was prior to the interstate system? I don’t think so.”
Yes, actually that *was* the way it was prior to the Interstate system; my grandmother who grew up in the ’20s could have told you all about it (and her adventures driving drunk).
“Colin Says:
August 29th, 2010 at 10:31 pm
Also, their stance on bike paths, mass transit and other “sustainability” projects seems pretty straightforward:
“On the other hand, asking federal highway users to pay substantially more in order to fund expanded programs for sidewalks, bikeways, recreational trails and more transit is unlikely to succeed, since the large majority of highway users do not use, and would not benefit from, these mostly localized urban project”
Which is of course a typical outright lie from the Reason Foundation.
Ever met a highway user who didn’t use sidewalks? I haven’t. You can’t stay in your car all the time, you know.
“T Says:
August 25th, 2010 at 10:15 pm
As a libertarian i find this article insulting … both a belief in infrastructure and in small government is possible. just because we don’t want large socialist programs doesn’t mean we don’t want working infrastructure. In the past local government chose where to spend money on infrastructure.”
The problem with that is that you never get decently designed connections across the country.
This sort of thinking gets you Ohio’s all-Ohio rail project, Illinois’s all-in-Illinois rail projects, etc., and at the expense of the more important and productive Chicago-Ohio projects (which have to go through rail-hostile Indiana).
Infrastructure has network effects, and transportation networks simply *demand* central planning, which is why they always end up being best when centrally planned. There’s lots of room for local planning for local networks, but for a national network, national planning is what gets you a good network. And due to those aforementioned network effects, the national planners have to have an impact on the local planners, or you get an intercity connection (be it road or rail) dumping out into an area with no local distributor connections.
Economically, transportation simply does not behave in ways which make total local control *work*, and this has been demonstrated for centuries and understood since at least Roman times. It is, to put it bluntly, *different* from most economic activity. A lot of things work very well with free-market structures; transportation networks simply do not. Honest libertarians recognize this. Dishonest ones lie about it. Thoughtless ones haven’t noticed.
Transportation networks are a fundamentally governmental activity; just as much so as policing is. Except unlike policing, which can be done effectively at a purely local scale with little in the way of national police — transportation *can’t*. Even armies need less centralization than efficient transportation does, and the centralization they need is mostly related to organization of troop and materiel movement, i.e. transportation. Transportation is arguably *the* fundamental job of government. (Even some of the other fundamental jobs, such as water and sewer service, are essentially about transportation.)
“Try Hong Kong. Libertarian: Low taxes, minimal state intervention”
Hong Kong has massive state intervention, right down to a government censorship office. Look it up.
Not particularly low taxes either.
“If you think the last decade was some sort of deregulatory era, then tell me what was deregulated.”
Banking — and in a very bad way. It was allowed to trend towards monopolies. Banking is also an inherently dangerous activity, involving as it does maturity mismatch and money printing, and if *anything* needs to be regulated, banking does.
Read Yves Smith for the best set of details on the disastrous banking deregulations.
Note that banking has been highly regulated in practically all societies ever. It would be about the last candidate for deregulation for anyone…. except someone who wanted to loot very large amounts of money from banks.
I agree with Colin. As a Libertarian there is no doubt in my mind that states would do a much better job with their own roads, builidings and sidewalks. We need to reform our tax base to the Fair Tax system. How would privatizing these structures be worse than what we have now Audeamus? It is obvious that the Feds who are led by the Federal Reserve have no money anyway and have devauled our dollar to nothing. Don’t get me started about social security. Food storage for the elderly anyone?
Secondly, why not let the states have different rules? The less rules the more prosperous the state would be. How about NJ’s Chris Christie? We recently went to Washington DC and told the Texans there to get ready for us if things go to hell!
And by the way, I would not give my teenager a beer even though I was drinking at that age myself. Libertarians are a bit diverse. Some are more conservative.
Who needs roads when you’ve got a Hummer? And if you’re so lazy and gormless that you can’t afford a proper vehicle like that, you deserve to be charged by the mile on privately owned pavement.