MetroRiderLA

I don’t remember paying for that… Image courtesy of kalavinka.

In spite of their name, freeways aren’t really free. No, in fact they are actually quite pricey to build, maintain, monitor, clean up, and expand. But when is the last time you reached into your wallet and handed out some cold hard cash to pay that price? I bet you can’t remember, because you never did such a thing. A hand reached into your wallet and took some money, but that hand wasn’t yours, no it was the frosty hand of the government.

That’s all fine and dandy, the government is always reaching into our wallets. In a few weeks the government will finish its job of taking a large percentage of my earnings from 2007. Federal, state, city, they’ve all got their grubby little hands in my pocketbook and there is very little I can do about it. Some people think this is the way it should be. They think the government knows best and that the government should have the power to take your money and distribute it for the betterment of the entire community. These people are called socialists. On the other end of the spectrum are people who think that the government is a bunch of morons, and that each individual should be free to do what they wish with their own money and lives.  These people are called libertarians.

It would seem logical that someone who doesn’t like the government intervening in the lives of individuals would have a big problem with freeways.  But as Alex Marshall notes in his article for Governing.com, that’s just not the case.  Most libertarians, by and large, love highways and auto roads, even though they are funded by the cold hand of the government picking our pockets.  At the same time, they despise mass transportation because, these days, it’s funded by the cold hand of the government picking our pockets.  How is it that publicly funded mass transit is socialism but publicly funded auto roads are the pinnacle of American freedom and free market capitalism?  It’s simple, these libertarians are actually not libertarians, they fall into another group: hypocrites.

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