Unpaving is Progressive
Posted by Kevin Carson on Aug 17, 2010 in Commentary • 8 commentsRachel Maddow and Paul Krugman, among others, have been in a tizzy recently about the unpaving of roads. One result of Congress’s refusal to renew counter-cyclical stimulus grants to state and local government is that fiscally strapped governments are cutting back on highway maintenance. Specifically, dozens of counties in several states are replacing asphalt roads with gravel. As Maddow summarized, in her August 9 broadcast:
“The Wall Street Journal reported recently on the growing number of places across the country where local governments are unpaving the roads. They are turning paved roads into gravel roads because paved roads too expensive to maintain. It is not one little town‘s whacky Luddite solution. It‘s happening in North Dakota, more than 100 miles of road in South Dakota, in 38 counties in Michigan, and it‘s happening in Ohio, and it‘s happening in Alabama, and it‘s happening in Pennsylvania.”
Liberal economist Paul Krugman described the process, in an August 8 NYT op-ed piece (“America Goes Dark“): “A country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself …”
Jim Kunstler could have predicted this, of course — and did, in “The Long Emergency.” The system of subsidized infrastructure on which the car culture and the long-haul trucking industry depend is unsustainable. Absent intensive maintenance, asphalt highways deteriorate rapidly until axle-breaking potholes render them impassable to eighteen-wheelers. As state and local governments are plagued by increasingly severe fiscal crisis, as part of the death spasms of corporate capitalism, and Peak Oil drives up the price of asphalt for roads, governments will defer maintenance on more and more “secondary” roads, retreating and regrouping to a smaller and smaller core of highways that are maintained regularly enough to support heavy trucks.
Anyone who understands the basic principles of economics will tell you that when you subsidize an input to production, you also subsidize business models that rely more intensively on that input at the expense of those who do not. So the subsidy generates geometrically increasing demand for more subsidized inputs, faster than the government can appropriate money to pay for them, until the system finally breaks down under its own weight.
The interesting thing about all this is that it gets to the inner contradiction at the heart of Michael Moore-style “Progressivism.”
Where Progressivism differs from regular old vanilla-flavored 20th century liberalism is in its critique — however diluted the coating of greenwash — of large-scale corporate capitalism: Mass consumption, planned obsolescence, and the car culture.
But Progressivism also sees itself as champion of the New Deal model of consensus capitalism. And the two mix like oil and water.
On the one hand, “Progressive” governments spend lots and lots of money on “infrastructure” like the Interstate Highway System.
On the other hand, mass suburbanization and the car culture, and the big box retailers’ “warehouses-on-wheels” distribution model, are direct results of the Interstate. They were built, after all, by auto industry veteran Charlie “What’s good for GM” Wilson.
As neo-Marxists like Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff at the Monthly Review never tire of pointing out, the automobile-highway complex was one of several government-created sinks for surplus capital, whose main practical effect was to overcome monopoly capitalism’s chronic tendency toward overaccumulation and overproduction. In other words, it served the same purpose that Emmanuel Goldstein ascribed to the perpetual warfare state: Utilizing enormous amounts of surplus industrial capacity by sinking billions of dollars worth of its output to the bottom of the ocean or blasting it into the stratosphere.
So we’re treated to the world historical irony of seeing Rachel Maddow come down on the side of the “growth machines”: Local coalitions of real estate developers whose main activity is lobbying government for more “infrastructure.”
Note to Rachel: The local Rotary Club yahoos who lobby to pave over entire counties with highways and more highways are the BAD GUYS. You can’t simultaneously be against the car culture and be a cheerleader for more government-subsidized roads. You can’t be for Alfred Chandler’s managerial capitalism and the Detroit Michael Moore’s dad lived in ca. 1948, and also be for all the hippy-dippy “act locally” stuff. Some things simply don’t go together. Your reflexive love for government, and a priori assumption that it is a “progressive” force that represents “all of us working together,” is blinding you to the essential corporatism of most of what government actually does.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
The traditional city is the likely model to replace subsidized suburban America. The current city model in America is highly unnatural, and not at all the consequence of market forces.
More info here: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/07…
Hopefully this will take hold and my Surly LHT with Xtracycle will become the next SUV.
Taxes, other than land value tax, are an indirect transfer from taxpayers to (mostly) landlords. Roads make land valuable by making it accessible. If the landlords who benefit are not willing to pay for the roads through a land value tax, or at least through its inferior cousin, the real property tax, then the roads should not be built or maintained.
Gasoline taxes are inappropriate for road building, and somewhat inappropriate for road maintenance, because those with the best roads use the least gasoline. The dedicated funds of gas tax revenues have created scrambles for slices of the highway fund pie, and that is probably the biggest reason why too many highways have been built.
This is not to say that gasoline taxes should not be levied at all. They are appropriate as a charge against polluting the atmospheric commons. It is only to say that they should not be used for building roads at all, and should not cover more than a fraction of the costs of maintaining roads.
Dan: Let me start by saying that, if there's to be a gradualist process of dismantling the state, the Georgist/Geolib agenda of obtaining whatever revenues are obtained in the interim through taxation of economic rents, negative externalities, etc., would be a step in the right direction. I agree with Adam Smith that taxes on economic rent are the least possible market-distorting form of taxation, so long as taxation exists.
And to the extent that land value taxation counters artificial scarcity rents and inflated site-rents accruing from state policies, it's at least a way of approximating (through the Rube Goldberg device of secondary state action) what would obtain without the primary state intervention of enforcing illegitimate land titles and subsidizing monoculture development in the first place.
I'm in sympathy with Georgist analysis, if not prescription, because I believe Ricardian rent describes something real and that the marginalists lost something important by subsuming the classical political economists' category of Land under the heading of Capital.
That being said, I prefer to approach things from the opposite direction. A great deal of differential rent on land is the result of uninternalized externalities, subsidies, and the like. You subsidize freeways and create monoculture bedroom communities and commercial sprawl, and in the process you create differential rent. As a simple matter of geometry (the larger the ratio of circumference to area), the differential rent premium on favorably situated land would be a lot less with a development pattern of proliferating small, mixed-use communities (like the old railroad suburbs). So instead of taxing land value to internalize the positive externalities of subsidized infrastructure, I'd stop subsidizing the infrastructure: fund the freeways entirely with tolls, make new developments pay the full cost of new utility infrastructure and access roads, etc. And I'd remove the legal barriers to building lots of housing within easy walking/bike/transit distance of work and shopping.
I'd also stop enforcing absentee titles to vacant and unimproved land — if it weren't for the artificial scarcity rents resulting from the proliferation of vacant lots in developed areas, differential rent would be a lot less of a problem.
"Your reflexive love for government, and a priori assumption that it is a “progressive” force that represents “all of us working together"
I know that that is a common libertarian perception (caricature?) of progressive thinking, but I don't sense it to be true, or at least not much. Seems more an *a posteriori* conviction that — however flawed — it is just about the only game in town. As regards the flaws, any progressive worth their salt can rattle off a laundry list of failures, outrages and even atrocities, starting with U.S. foreign policy and ongoing/endless wars (and indeed the whole military-industrial complex), and continuing through blah de blah de blah (Tuskegee, Katrina, the War on Drugs, Philadelpha MOVE incident, whatever, insert 55 more things here). People who can so rattle off do not have a "reflexive love for government"; more like, at worst, a SOMETIMES too-generous/forgiving overall approach to it. I cannot see blaming them all that much for failure to have an anarchist-style relentless hostility to the state, when they view the state (at least partially correctly at this point in time) as the only mechanism through which at least some modicum of social justice and protection of the defenseless can be practically realized. That is, a "modicum" across a larger zone than, say, one's immediate neighbors.
I think the generalization is justified, Alan. I've seen too much expression of liberal outrage in the comments at Matt Yglesias reflexively responding to any suggestion that it might be a good idea to scale back the regulatory regime to make it easier for little guys to operate. And they really do seem to work from the unquestioned default assumptions that government regulations are instituted for "progressive" reasons, and that anyone who challenges them is some sort of Reaganite. Any suggestion that licensing and safety regulations enable incumbent providers to jack up their prices and lock people out of self-employment leads, in a matter of seconds, to some kneejerk liberal bringing up "amateur brain surgeons" as some sort of unanswerable argument.
Kevin: I share your dislike of kneejerk liberals, and most liberals in general, and anyone with a
eflexive love of government. But liberals are not progressives. If you want to define progressive as people like Bill and Hillary Clinton, etc., (i.e. moderate Republicans, and unequivocal statists), then of course you're right. But I define progressive differently, and in that context, my points stand. Read some real progressive material at znet or wherever, and you'll see what I mean.
There's no need to slander progressives and heap calumny on progressivism in order to make your generally very excellent points. Stick to the essentials. You're stronger and more effective that way.
Alan: By "progressive" I didn't mean either conventional establishment liberals like the Clintons, or the genuine lefties at Zmag. I meant the sort of people in mainstream American politics who typically refer to themselves as "progressive," like Maddow and Olbermann and their followers. And that kind of progressivism is very much an unstable mixture of conventional managerial liberalism with greenish hippie sensibilities. My whole point was that the two stands of that kind of "progressivism" simply don't mix.