Libertarians turning libertarian on sprawl?

Libertarians turning libertarian on sprawl?

Benjamin Ross: Libertarians turning libertarian on sprawl?

For years, conservative opinion-making on transportation and land use issues has been dominated by defenders of the highway lobby posing, as I pointed out in Dissent a few years ago, as libertarians. Sprawl-inducing government policies–subsidized highways, minimum lot sizes, bans on apartments and two-family houses, parking minimums, and many others–have been rationalized as the workings of the free market by way of intellectual contortions that are sometimes truly spectacular. Right-wing critics of sprawl such as Michael Lewyn have begun lately to win a hearing, but up to now dissenting conservative voices have been largely confined to blogs and publications like the American Conservative.

Now comes the prominent libertarian economist Tyler Cowen with a New York Times column devoted to the baleful effects of free parking. Cowen does not directly criticize the right-wing orthodoxy, but showcasing the free-market case against sprawl so prominently is bound to shift the terms of discussion.

With luck, debates over sprawl can now move beyond the tiresome and intellectually sterile task of exposing dishonest arguments and incoherent thinking. There is much territory to explore. Take Cowen’s topic of parking. There can be little doubt that deregulating the building of parking spaces would be a vast improvement over the current situation, but would the free market yield a social optimum? Should parking be taxed to recover the street-building costs it imposes on local governments? Should merchants be allowed to “bundle” it with other goods they sell, or is customer-only free parking a form of price discrimination? Serious discussion of such topics has barely begun.