Now the same state works to reverse progress in every possible way and even brag about the glorious things it is doing to make our lives more miserable.
It even has the chutzpah to tout that it alone can beat back our constant struggle to have a better life, and it expects us to thank our masters for this — and pay for the privilege.
These are thoughts that hit me as I read the New York Times report "Across Europe, Irking Drivers is Urban Policy." Yes, that's right: policies are not trying to make driving easier and less of a problem but harder and more of a problem so that people will abandon their cars and hoof it just like life before the invention of the wheel.
Now, truly, the ability to hop into a driver-directed steel contraption that can take us wherever we want to go at 200 miles per hour has to count as one of the great accomplishments in the history of mankind. The unleashing of human volition! For 100 years now, wherever we find progress, joy, and human fulfillment, we find the car. The car has very nearly conquered the great problems presented by the existence of scarcity of time and space, and made us able to achieve essential tasks. We work, live, shop, and travel where we want and get to each place in a fraction of the time it took our ancestors.
So what does the state do? It tries to stop it all. European governments are "creating urban environments openly hostile to cars," says the Times. "The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation."
The Space Shuttle is pretty badass too, but libertarians never seem to brag on it. Why is that? Oh yeah, government project.
Well guess what, boys? Public roads aren't called that for ironic reasons. The car has done all the things that Jeffrey Tucker mentions here because the state paid for the car to be able to do them.
This book is instructive. Traffic, essentially, has a natural level. The more road capacity there is, the more traffic there will be. The less there is (or the less free it is), the less there will be. In the end, your commute may well take the same amount of time either way. My own dear city of Dallas is spending billions to redo several major freeways, but in some cases, it isn't adding lanes. It's turning some lanes into toll lanes, complete with prices that vary based on the amount of traffic in the free lanes.
Ignoring the environmental considerations (and they're considerable - the EPA is always threatening to fine the crap out of Dallas and Houston due to ozone levels) there is also the basic libertarian consideration that the state must use its eminent domain power, and its tax power, every time it wants to build or expand a road. In the case of expansion, it must cause a pain in the ass to every driver using the existing road (and as I live exactly between two of the biggest expansions currently underway, I feel that posterior pain every day). In the case of toll roads or toll lanes, it must then give a regulated monopoly (two little words, yet oh, how they warm the heart) to either a private company or some quasi-governmental toll authority. All this so that the freeways can accommodate more traffic and more people can get where they are going just as slowly.
This is the libertarian solution, apparently.
Given Mises' reputation, I suspect he would have hacked up a gob on Jeffrey Tucker and called him a Communist before ordering him never to speak to any respectable member of the Mises Institute again. No offense, Jeffrey.
Trains are terribly expensive per passenger mile. No one will ride buses except proles. To make things worse, Rapid Transit Authorities are dens of thieves. Dallas Area Rapid Transit once misplaced a billion dollars; I'm not sure if I ever heard whether they found it again. There hasn't been a good solution to transportation since private streetcar lines were owned by housing developers who used them essentially as an incentive to sell land further out from the city than people would otherwise be willing to live. After decades of misincentivization, it's probably too late to do this correctly, frankly. But can we at least quit pretending that correctly means more cars? The states of Europe aren't working to make their citizens more miserable, they're working to force them to be smarter, on this topic anyway, than the Von Mises Institute.
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