I’m a new subscriber to this, my first and only blog. I greatly enjoy the insights, turns of phrase, and general outlook on life of Jeffrey Tucker. However, his recent piece on the wonderfulness of cars (How Blessed Is the State That Thus Destroyeth the Automobile) has stirred my confrontational juices.
Carworld (the world rebuilt by government for the smooth running of the automobile) is a huge instance of government interference in the marketplace largely ignored in the libertarian community. That’s natural. People generally go easy on their own drug of choice, and most libertarians are happy beneficiaries of government support for the car.
First a relevant excerpt from the book Globocop…
“The 1910s were a watershed in the concentration of governmental power. Take, for example, that first great crusade of the progressive movement. Eager to free America from the evil clutches of greedy railroad capitalism, progressives turned their starry eyes to the automobile. 1916 was one fateful year in a fateful decade, the year progressives finally convinced government that infrastructure for this one mode of transportation, but not others, should be totally “free,” that roads built specifically for cars by taxes should be national policy. Intellectuals were sure that they could do better than the hidden hand so they withdrew the power to decide where to spend transportation money from the individual and gave it to themselves, agents of the state.
A century earlier, Jeffersonian Democrats steadfastly opposed what were then called internal improvements. Presidents Madison, Monroe, and Jackson each vetoed as unconstitutional legislation that would have had the federal government get into the road-building business. In the new progressive era of the 1910s, constitutional constraints were unimportant. For intellectuals, cars were good while trains, trolleys, and interurbans - the main components of the era’s privately built mass transit system - were a few short steps from evil incarnate. Cars were inherently so inefficient, though, that in a natural market they were destined to remain no more than an attractive but relatively small part of the total transportation system, with people able to live normal lives without car dependency. However, intellectuals, confident that their vision and understanding surpassed the crude mechanisms of the natural market, effectively removed marketplace constraints from the automobile, eventually making it the only viable choice for most people. Given the power to do so by progressive philosophy, they rebuilt the world for the smooth running of the automobile.
Progressives never could have predicted the effects of their usurpation of power, their unnatural intervention in the eco-web, their government dictated simplification and homogenization of the transportation system. They might have predicted the destruction of what, even now, remains the most comprehensive mass transit system ever built anywhere in the world. But they never could have predicted the destruction of Downtown, Main Street, and human-scale communities, or rising daytime age segregation with adults and their children miles apart, or rising crime and isolation, or the increased pressures on family structure and family finances (cars are really expensive to own and operate, after all), or the huge tax burden. They never could have predicted sprawl and the paving over of farmlands and wildlands. They never could have predicted how the subsidy would enrich faraway desert dictators who would use their accidental wealth to threaten the world. What they did predict, time and time again, in utopian novels and architectural mockups, were clean megacities in which the working class lived in giant skyscrapers set in parks while the intellectual class (including, presumably, themselves) commuted from suburbs on uncrowded streets.” END QUOTE
If that grabs your interest, here’s an article published some fifteen years ago
by Libertarian Alliance in London: The Automobile Century, How Subsidized Roads Wrecked 20th Century America:
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/histn/histn025.htm
The genesis of that article… I had written a letter to a leftist British rag called Bike Culture. They published it as kind of a joke (I mean, come on now, non-authoritarian solutions to the problem of Carworld?). Someone at Libertarian Alliance read it and thankfully didn’t see the humor in it. They asked me to flesh it out into a longer article. I happily obliged, thus kicking off my meager writing career, such as it is.
Good day to all y’all from Japan!
"most libertarians are happy beneficiaries of government support for the car."
Mischaracterization. Roads, utilities, tax breaks...they are consumed because that tends to be the easiest or most economical choice. It's not like we have much of a choice with some things (should be trespass on private property instead of use roads?), when the state games the system.
Can we stop criticizing libertarians for using their prison floor as a bed?
Jay, great metaphor about the prison floor! And the point about criticizing libertarians certainly got me thinking.
But I’m afraid I’ll stick with the charges. I’d be greatly encouraged about our future if a busload of libertarians jumped in here and proved me wrong, but I suspect most are quite happy sleeping on this particular floor. M’ man Jeffrey, who otherwise has great insights and attitudes towards life, seems quite comfortable, for example. I mean, if that’s all you know, it’s hard to see the problem. And for most Americans, Carworld is all they know. They can envision making Carworld better. They can’t envision something better than Carworld.
In my case, it’s not all I know. After 30 years in Tokyo and close to 20 studying the topic, the glaring deficiencies are obvious; the biggest would be the destruction of human-scale communities. And I’m sadly one of the few for whom this particular aspect of the forgotten history of America is NOT forgotten. Anyone who doesn’t know what an “interurban” is (and it’s not even in most dictionaries any more!) doesn’t know what I’m talking about. But, before our government’s grand experiment in social engineering, America had the best mass transportation system this world has ever seen, then or now, and it was mostly private.