Maybe the delay in posts led you to believe the Rothbard Series was complete. The good news is that there are a few more posts to go, and the ones coming up next should be the most interesting to urbanists.
If you haven’t kept up with our discussion, Murray Rothbard’s classic For A New Liberty [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Orange County Register’s Freedom Politics website (check out my rent control article FreePo published in March) features articles discussing two differing takes on road privatization from notable scholars Walter Block and Robert Poole.
In Robert Poole’s article, he discusses the merits of the increasingly popular use of Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) to fund and operate [...]
Some other things to ponder for the next time you are sitting on a congested highway…
When I talk to people about tolling roads, most people immediately reject the idea entirely. I like to ask them to think about it next time they are in a traffic jam. Hey, if you sit in traffic, you probably [...]
Recently, I came accross an article by Charles Johnson, who blogs at Rad Geek. The article had linked to a Market Urbanism post about how user fees and gas taxes fall well short of funding road use in the US. Charles’ article further debunks the Urbanism Legend asserted by free-market imposters that a free-market highway [...]
Of course, Chicago is just privatizing the revenue from meters, not the actual parking spaces. Plus, the city will regulate rate increases, but it’s a step in the right direction. (right?)
For today’s politicians, this is a great way to get windfalls of money today for revenues of future generations in order [...]
Congestion pricing schemes, touted as environmentally-responsible at the time of $4 gas, were defeated in New York City last Spring. However, as the market turmoil threatens to wreak havoc on tax revenues, fiscal necessity has lured New York State and New York City politicians to re-examine the political viability of charging tolls to drivers [...]