It's Only a Jetsons World if You Live on Mars

My co-blogger already excoriated Jeffery Tucker's silly and ignorant article on cars, but I cannot resist the urge to pile on, because in the article Mr. Tucker commits what I see as the most rampant and pernicious error libertarians make: he completely fails to understand the role of the state in creating the world he now fears it will destroy. He sees the state as an ugly varnish applied to the beautiful fresco that is market society, but the truth is that for us today, the state wielded the brush, chose the pigments, and decided the theme of that fresco.

Mr. Tucker loves to jump in his car and revels in driving, seeing it as "one of the great accomplishments in the history of mankind." His childlike excitement is touching, but his knowledge of history appears equally childlike. For Mr. Tucker's 1995 Accord requires a highly specialized surface on which to operate- a paved and graded road- and to reach the speeds that give him such thrills he needs carefully engineered freeways, in order to avoid wrapping his human volition around a tree. And these roads are all provided by the state, and they are nearly all free at the point of use. Here's the most hysterical paragraph:

The war on the car dates back a half century. Not even the interstate highways were really built for cars. They were built for military trucks to roll around the country and control it in the event of an invasion or an uprising. The car has never really had friends in government. The car is a product of private markets, used by individuals to accomplish individual goals.

I'll wait for you to stop giggling. Ready? Good. Let's do this together. First, Mr. Tucker's claim that the interstates were not built for cars but instead for military trucks is frankly bizarre and disintegrates after even a cursory examination of military trucks and freeways. Very few military vehicles reach speeds higher than sixty miles an hour, and those few that do cannot maintain them for long. Further, the military moves in convoys- long, slow convoys. The military does not need roads engineered for speeds in excess of a hundred miles an hour. What does? Cars do. And mysteriously, the head of GM was involved in planning the interstate system, for which automobile manufacturers had been lobbying since the 1920s.

The automobile manufacturers were savvier than the old railroad tycoons. The railroads were built with extensive government subsidies, but the lines themselves remained in private hands- and therefore so did the cost for their maintenance and responsibility for alleviating congestion. So rather than building the highly specialized surfaces their products needed themselves, they got the government to do it, and kept the roads in "public" hands. The roads were free (at the point of use, of course) and should they become a nuisance- a crowded, stinking, slow-moving one- why, the government had to fix the problem!

So governments are trying to fix these problems. The congestion, the pollution, the competition for petroleum, these are all costs Mr. Tucker (and the rest of us) don't have to bear directly and in proportion to how much we drive. They are externalized by the state, but they remain real problems. So now the state fumblingly tries to fix them in its usual hamfisted manner, but instead of understanding the root problem- the state's externalization of costs- Mr. Tucker appears to put his faith in magic. He somehow believes that the costs of driving can be magicked away, perhaps by shaking Man, Economy, and State at them, and that they exist only because mean, hateful governments make it so.

In a Jetsons' World, you can apparently suck massive amounts of petroleum from the ground, smear the heavier fractions of it onto the surface of the earth and use the lighter fractions to propel yourself at fantastical speeds all without imposing any costs at all on anyone ever, or rather you could, except the mean nasty government won't let you! It's hard to understand why so many people don't take libertarians seriously.

Here's the truth: if your lifestyle requires you to impose costs on others, be it through belching noxious gases into the air, dumping filth into the water, or using vast tracts of land for free, then your lifestyle is dependent on the state. Because in a market order, your neighbors are going to be very interested to know who the hell you think you are when you fill the air they breathe with fumes, the guy who owns the fisheries will be curious to know how much you are going to pay him for the fish your wastewater kills, and the guy who owns the open road will expect you to pony up every time you take your human volition for a spin.

I'm not demanding a puritanical refusal to interact with the state or benefit from its policies. My standard answer to such demands is that since I was forced to buy the ticket, I may as well ride the ride. And the state is so thoroughly enmeshed in modern life that living "outside the statist quo" is plainly impossible. Even if you adopt subsistence farming on unowned wilderness, state action still protects you and your crops from disease while the Forest Service will put out wildfires threatening your property.

But riding the ride and praising the ride are two different things. Mr. Tucker- and many, many other libertarians- want to throw their hands in the air and shout "whoopee!" while pretending the carnies are their mortal foes. They either ignore all the negative impacts of our state-backed society or, even worse, pretend that somehow these real problems are ruses created by ne'er-do-wells seeking to impinge on their liberty. Fantasy and delusion are not substitutes for sober analysis of reality. We are all forced to buy the ticket and we may as well ride the ride, but the carnie is a con artist and the carnival must close.