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Rothbard the Urbanist Part 4: Policing

I apologize for the extended delay between posts.  Personal (newborn) and professional priorities have prevented me from having the free time I once had. Unfortunately posts will probably continue to be sporadic until things settle down a little. We are now at Part 4 in the multi-part series delving into the urbanist-friendly ideas in Murray Rothbard’s classic For a New Liberty.   (available free from Mises.org as pdf, web page, and audio book)  In case you missed them, here are the first three parts: Rothbard the Urbanist Part 1: Public Education’s Role in Sprawl and Exclusion Rothbard the Urbanist Part 2: Safe Streets Rothbard the Urbanist Part 3: Prevention of Blockades As we continue through Chapter 11 of For A New Liberty, Rothbard continues to make valid points regarding safety and policing in a fully private-landowner system.  This passage is notably interesting in its discussion of the successes of private railroads.  Whether competition in the private street market would create a vibrant marketplace similar to the early days of the railroad is an interesting topic for discussion.  I’d tend to agree with Rothbard, but of course some imagination is required to envision such a radically different society: There is of course nothing new or startling in the principle of this envisioned libertarian society. We are already familiar with the energizing effects of inter-location and inter-transportation competition. For example, when the private railroads were being built throughout the nation in the nineteenth century, the railroads and their competition provided a remarkable energizing force for developing their respective areas. Each railroad tried its best to induce immigration and economic development in its area in order to increase its profits, land values, and value of its capital; and each hastened to do so, lest people and markets leave their area and move to the […]

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.

Yglesias Has My Head Spinning…

In his last two urbanism-related posts, Matthew Yglesias makes great points only to dissolve them in a vat of unrelated statements posed as conclusions.  His logical inconsistency seems to invalidate his otherwise pretty good blogging on urbanism. A couple days ago, Matthew blogged about regulation of neighborhood retail, quoting a DC blog: “In DC, zoning laws make that idea [mixed-use retail] prohibitive, and what the zoning laws don’t cover ANC and neighborhood groups do in their zealousness to protect residents from interspersing residences with commercial activity.” …. I really and truly wish libertarians would spend more time working on this kind of issue. And I also wish that ordinary people would think harder about these kind of regulations. Yes!  More, please?   But then, the next sentence leaves me saying, “huh?”: I’m a big government liberal. I believe business regulations are often needed. But still, there ought to be a presumption that people can do what they want. So, I really don’t understand what this post has to do with libertarians anymore – why even mention them. It seems logically inconsistent to presume people can do what they want, while presuming a big government can regulate their economic choices. Now, on to today’s post: Randall O’Toole is a relentless advocate for highways and automobile dependency in the United States. Consequently, I don’t agree with him about very much.  But the thing I consistently find most bizarre about him, is that the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation have both agreed to agree with O’Toole that his support for highways and automobile dependency is a species of libertarianism. then… Central planning, of course, is the reverse of libertarianism. So if promoting alternative transportation is central planning, then building highways everywhere must be freedom! But of course in the real world building highways […]

Are You a Wright or Friedman Urbanist?

In a post blogger Eric Orozco called, ‘forerunner candidate for “most incisive blog post” of the year,’ Daniel Nairn of Discovering Urbanism discussed the seemingly conflicted camps of libertarianism when it comes to Urbanism.  His observations are based upon the comments in the Volokh article on planning and walkability linked in the previous post. Daniel (a non-libertarian) presents the opposing libertarian factions as The Wright Group, after Frank Lloyd Wright and his romanticism about individualistic prairie living and The Friedman Group, which “believes that the spatial distribution of development ought to be determined by a free market.” The Wright group seems to favor optimizing individual autonomy through spatial living arrangements even if doing so requires centralizing economic and political authority to some extent. The Friedman group seems to favor optimizing individual autonomy through market decisions even if doing so results in more people living in situations where full control over private property is compromised in some way. Daniel’s insightful choice of figureheads fascinates me from a philosophical point of view.  Frank Lloyd Wright was hardly a libertarian, but had strong individualist tendencies, and is said to be the model for Howard Roark’s character in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.  Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laurette Economist, is probably one of the most famous figures of modern libertarian thought.  Despite Friedman’s steadfast defense of liberty, he had favored government roads on occasion. I think most would agree that The Friedman Group, as Daniel describes it, is more closely aligned with the thesis of Market Urbanism and the ideas of emergent order of the land marketplace.  Hayek or even Rothbard may also be considered appropriate, although less famous substitutes as figurehead. (note: I’m not sure what Daniel means by,  “even if doing so results in more people living in situations where full control over […]

Do We Need “New Urbanism” To Fix “Unwalkable Sprawl”?

At Volokh, Ilya Somin discusses a recent piece in the American Prospect (also linked from here) that favors “New Urbanism” to prevent “unwalkable” sprawl.  Somin favors “voting with your feet” as the preferred method of satisfying location preferences.  Unfortunately, voting options have been whittled down through government interventions: To the extent that we do need to enable more people to live in densely populated urban areas, it’s far from clear that government planning is the best way to achieve that goal. We can better achieve the same objective by cutting back on planning rather than increasing it. In many large cities, the cost of housing is artificially inflated by restrictive zoning laws, which tends to price out the poor and some middle class people. In the suburbs, as Adler points out, zoning policies sometimes artificially decrease density, for example by forbidding "mixed use" neighborhoods where commercial and residential uses are in close proximity to each other. The ultimate question is whether we should trust deeper interventions into land use to fix the complete failure of past interventions.  Long before “New Urbanism” was the progressive utopian ideal, sprawling, auto-friendly and trolley-free, single-family suburbs was their “American Dream”.  But, progressives quickly forget their history when it turns out their past visions created something they are now supposed to hate: Like previous generations of planners, the new urbanists often ignore the diversity of human preferences. Some people do indeed like high-density "walkable" environments. Others prefer to have more space and more peace and quiet. Neither preference is inherently superior to the other. To paraphrase a popular liberal slogan, we should celebrate diversity, not seek to use urban planning to force everyone to live the same lifestyle whether they want to or not. The post evokes the typical variety of comments ranging from standard […]

Block vs Poole: The Public-Private Partnership Debate

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 roadways: Four potential benefits are particularly important: Fewer Boondoggles: Elected officials often champion projects that yield political benefits but have costs greater than their benefits. But with PPP toll projects, nobody will invest unless the benefits exceed the costs to the extent that they can project a positive return on their investment. That’s a powerful safeguard against boondoggles. Avoiding “Big Dig” Disasters: Large-scale “mega-projects” like Boston’s notorious Big Dig are prone to large cost over-runs and schedule delays. In a well-structured PPP project, those risks can be transferred to the private sector, shielding taxpayers from those costs. Cost Minimization: Traditional highway projects are built by the lowest-bidder, which often means they are built cheaply and need lots of expensive maintenance over their lifetimes. But a PPP toll highway must be maintained for decades at the private company’s expense. Hence, it has every incentive to build it right to begin with, to minimize total life-cycle cost. Sustainable Congestion Relief: If you add ordinary freeway lanes, they tend to fill up and become congested. But today’s urban toll lanes use variable pricing (as on the 91 Express Lanes) to keep traffic flowing smoothly on a long-term basis. In contrast, Walter Block takes a more principled stand for complete privatization: Public – private partnerships (PPP) are thus part and parcel of both fascism and socialism; they constitute a partial state ownership of the means of production. As well, they are emblematic of fascism, and government is the senior […]

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