Month June 2009

Rothbard the Urbanist Part 3: Prevention of Blockades

In the last post, we discussed the first paragraphs of chapter 11 of Murray Rothbard’s For A New Liberty. (available free from Mises.org as pdf, web page, and audio book) Those paragraphs discussed the private ownership of all land, including streets and roads. Rothbard clearly and concisely argues that private ownership of streets would result in safer public spaces. Discussions I have had with people often lead to the topic of forestalling, in which a sinister land owner decides to completely surround a neighbor’s property, preventing him from using it. This valid concern can be eased through a principled analysis of such a situation: At this point in the discussion, someone is bound to raise the question: If streets are owned by street companies, and granting that they generally would aim to please their customers with maximum efficiency, what if some kooky or tyrannical street owner should suddenly decide to block access to his street to an adjoining homeowner? How could the latter get in or out? Could he be blocked permanently, or be charged an enormous amount to be allowed entrance or exit? The answer to this question is the same as to a similar problem about land-ownership: Suppose that everyone owning homes surrounding someone’s property would suddenly not allow him to go in or out? The answer is that [p. 204] everyone, in purchasing homes or street service in a libertarian society, would make sure that the purchase or lease contract provides full access for whatever term of years is specified. With this sort of “easement” provided in advance by contract, no such sudden blockade would be allowed, since it would be an invasion of the property right of the landowner. A likely solution to this issue of forestalling, would be the emergence of “access insurance”. This would […]

A few updates

I added a few features to improve the reader experience: 1. I started using twitter (in addition to linking on delicious) to share links to related articles. You can follow the Market Urbanism twitter feed here. I think I’ll eventually phase out the delicious feed, and use twitter exclusively. 2. I migrated the comments to DISQUS. The comments should remain threaded as they did before, but will have added functionality for commenters such as: * Track and manage comments and replies * Verified commenter reputations across sites * More control over your own comments on websites * Never lose your comments, even if the website goes away * Build a global profile, or comment blog, to collect and show off what you’re saying * Easier to comment on websites using Disqus * Reply to comments through email or mobile * Edit and republish comments with one click Please let me know if you encounter any problems with the new commenting system. 3. Based on some of the discussions on recent posts, which I found very valuable, I decided it would be good to add a FAQ page. This is under development, but I think it will serve as a valuable resource. Let me know if you have any questions for the FAQ or suggestions.

O’Toole Under More Fire

At Streetsblog, Ryan Avent presented a scorching attack on the most notorious free-market impostor – Randal O’Toole: Taking Liberties With the Facts for his consistent hypocrisy: The Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole gets under the skin of many of those interested in building a more rational and green metropolitan geography, but in many ways he’s an ideal opponent. It would be difficult to concoct more transparently foolish arguments than his. The man is an engine of self-parody. The requisite identification of “libertarian” contradictions: This is one thing I’ve never understood about the libertarian love affair with highways; they seem utterly blind to the fact that it has required and continues to require massive government action to build and maintain the road network. The interstate highway system is perhaps the single largest government intervention in the economy in the 20th century. Reading O’Toole you’d think it was a wonder of the free market. And with ease, Ryan points out the data needed to take O’Toole to task on his persistent assertion the “roads pay for themselves”: The source of his blindness on the issue seems to be due to his belief that roads pay for themselves, and that congestion exists only because governments shift gas tax revenue to pay for transit and other smart growth projects. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the first place, gas tax revenue comes nowhere near paying for roads. Federal gasoline tax revenues cover barely half of the annual budget of the Federal Highway Administration. Add in diesel tax revenues and you’re still short. And that’s just the federal budget picture. In response, Randal replies to critics in the comments of his latest post of his “Antiplanner” blog: The Antiplanner sees the American dream as freedom of lifestyle choices and opportunities to realize those choices […]

Rothbard the Urbanist Part 2: Safe Streets

It turns out the entire Chapter 11 called “The Public Sector, II: Streets and Roads” is actually a chapter on Market Urbanism. Bryan Caplan considers this chapter "the least convincing chapter in the book", but as a Market Urbanist, I strongly disagree. I do admit that his discussion of safety and policing of private local streets involves a great deal of speculation and reliance on faith in the action of individual agents, but the insights into road subsidization and land-use patterns was decades ahead of its time. These insights may not seem so radical now, but imagine the resistance to these ideas in the days before urbanism gained much credibility.