You are looking at mobility and seeing a huge management problem, “…requiring a huge amount of resources and research…â€?. This then naturally is a task for government to manage, requiring a department of roads, integrated with the department of housing and works, data collection tools, bureaucrats to organize it in an integrated fashion and policies, procedures and rules. You also need a means to force people to do what the planners want. Into this mix you then have to throw considerations not of where people want to live but where the system allows them to live – misdirected good intentions of ‘freedom’ be damned.
I would argue that this is close to the system we currently have – and it is, as you note, “crapâ€? and “stupidly inefficientâ€?

well, no. It is not the system we have at all! It is a hodgepodge of special interests (such as business) and stupidity.

What are the consequences of PMV subsidies in a country with high transport costs? reading about business cycles and the impacts of PMV subsidies can help the thought process in this regard.

One quick example, which is close to my heart and really annoys me, there has been no attempt to make it more attractive to own what the Japanese call kei-class cars, the only one currently for sale in Australia that I know of is the Smart car. The Japanese have a ‘kei-class’ because of beneficial parking and registration laws. Instead we have a bloody government that allows farmers to subsidise 4WD ownership. A kei-class car is literally half the size of most 4WDs. To me this is a very good example of getting “cars off the road” by reducing the size of cars themselves. If people could by a brand new kei-class car for under $10,000 and then pay bugger all to run it (insurance, rego, parking, tolls, etc), how many people wouldn’t buy them? Instead we have stupid luxury brand kei-class cars that are far too expensive. They are not all stupid little boxy things either, there are some very cool cars available. There is no force here. A brilliant opportunity was missed in mid-1990s with the high visibility of import car culture as the various enthuisast cultures swung away from traditional cultures.

I suggest you need to do some more research about the current system of automobility because it is frankly very frustrating having a discussion with someone who seems to have a very abstract sense of the problems at hand.

In a social democratic / big government conservative / traditional socialist framework, the government tries to frame and enforce progressively more rules on how people interact. To me, you are simply saying that there should be more rules, imposed by government, on our automobility. I would disagree. If there are externalities in the automobility, then try to ensure those externalities are priced in and step back.

As you admit, there has to be some planning. I am saying there should be different rules that endeavour to release urban populations from the burden of the current system of automobility. This is the complete opposite of your alleged ‘policy’ which appears to have been formulated with a focus group of boofhead accountants who all wished they played football. Of course, I am not the one trying to produce policy.

What I have been trying my hardest to repeatedly indicate in many different ways is how simply freeing up what you clearly misunderstand to be mere ‘restrictions’ will somehow make the system of automobility better. No, the system of automobility will not be better, it has already been constructed through these ‘restrictions’ it already exists and unlike the ‘market’ cannot change overnight so it will be more of the same but in intensified form.

If you need planning, as you do with roads, then it should react to people’s expressed will, not attempt to push them down paths fixed as part of some master plan.

OMG! The system of automobility ALREADY PUSHES THEM DOWN CERTAIN PATHS, THE EXACT SAME PATHS THAT YOU WANT TO INTENSIFY AND REPRODUCE. The material conditions of the system of automobility, the roads, the technologies, etc are already pushing people down paths, LITERALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

People do not have any will that is not in part determined by the already established system of automobility. Have you ever lived in a non-automobilised society? Has anyone?

Any policy from a properly libertarian party will endeavour to enable people to have a will that is free from the already existing material conditions that in part produce it. You transport policy does not help people build on their freedom, it forces them to be further forced into the current system of automobility. I think the key is to get people to use the already existing infrastructure in different ways, but you know, that is just me. I am a car enthusiast because I have made the choice and a number of subsequent decisions involving the affirmation to drive my car when I want, which is very rarely, not because I am compelled to.

I can’t see what you are peddling is freedom at all, it is further subsumption to the already existing state of affairs. I am not sure if you are aware of how complexity theorists talk about ‘degress of freedom’, but I am trying to convince you that real freedom comes from increasing the degrees of freedom, not just intensifying the already existing situation.

But I don’t advocate protectionism per se, I do wonder about the wisdom of an economic system that says cheap imports of produce are better for our economy that the locally made and higher quality. If the Chinese imports were of the same quality (they are not – grown with human excrement, polluted, DDT-infused, protein life already expired when you open the can and yet labelling laws allow them to use fresh tomatoes as content indicators) – if they were of comparable quality and the laws were just, and we still could not compete, then fine, fuck the farmers. Perhaps dumping legislation is dumb, fine – but you need to come up with solutions to situations like the above. You’ll get your way with either party I suspect.

My concern is that ‘laissez faire economics’ had its day and didn’t quite cut the mustard. Like when Milton Friedman suggested that the Great Depression was a result of -too much government regulation- in the market. Well, Milty, history can either be a set of things that happened or it can be a fairytale. I grew up in a poor area of London during Thatcher’s economic ‘restructuring’ of England, and I won’t accept – and will argue vehemently – that the approach taken to modernise the British economy, partially fuelled by a taste for laissez-faire was a catagorical, absolute economic disaster that stunted the move from manufacturing and agriculture into service by a decade or more. History regards that period as an economic miracle, but aside from the (admittedly very necessary) extrication of the unions from the wages agreement debacle of the early 1980s, you will be hard pressed to find a successful law passed in that period – and most of them referenced laissez faire. You’ll excuse me, then, if my perspective is skewed, or that I seem uninformed to you.

I actually deeply sympathise with a good deal of LDP policy, but things like a version of free trade where chinese tomatoes flood our market, not allowing local farmers to compete, is just stupid government. The massive waste of resources involved is epochal, and to say ‘well, that’s just the way love goes’ is nothing short of voodoo superstition. There’s a field, here’s my mouth. Why am I eating chinese tomatoes grown with wildly inferior health standards and composition? Because its cheap? Again, poor government.

We need to produce cheaper corn syrup in order to distill more ethanol, don’t we? Isn’t this the backbone of Bush’s new ethanol plan? Look how the topic has gone back to cars, see how unintended the consequences of conversations are.

Neither of us “needs” to think deeper (but it always helps), but Christian does need to read deeper, he mightn’t yet like the conclusion but there are valid reasons for it. The economy isn’t some mythical entity, it is the process of achieving certain ends. When you alter incentives, ends and action will change as so will valuations and perceptions.

Again this isn’t an abstraction. Subsidising sugar porduction in the US for example increases phosphate pollution and wetlands degradation and drainage. It also leads to the use of cheaper corn syrup (cheaper after the inflating subsidy) which is a contributing factor to increasing obesity rates.

We don’t know what will happen with great certainty either way what will happen, because no one has the capcaity or skill to process all of the information.

We do know that inflation, market protectionism, high taxes, deficit spending, resource and credit mispricing and regulatory excess are bad for our well being.

Maybe you should read a bit deeper.

I’ll vote for her.