An inadvertent critique of Friedrich Hayek from a conservative perspective
By Percy Wegmann
I’ve started using Connor Boyack's children's book series The Tuttle Twins to help me teach libertarian civics to my two children. The Road to Surfdom, fifth in the series, attempts to bring the lessons from F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom to a children’s audience. The book focuses on the unintended consequences of central planning and how they both impoverish people and violate their civil liberties.
The Road to Surfdom begins with the Tuttle family facing unexpected traffic on the way to their favorite beach vacation spot La Playa, only to find empty beaches and defunct businesses. The twins’ uncle Ben, an investigative journalist, enlists their help to find out what happened. They learn that voters approved a new master transportation plan aimed at reducing congestion. Unfortunately, voters didn’t anticipate all the consequences of the plan’s implementation, opening a new road to Surfdom beach, closing the old road to La Playa, seizing land from a local dairy farmer via eminent domain, and trapping workers from a now defunct commercial creamery in homes whose property values have collapsed.
The book focuses on the disruption to the lives of La Playa’s residents and the pains of change. It’s a moving message, but more of a conservative one than a libertarian one; liberty means getting to make your own choices, not getting the outcomes you want. As the book itself points out, some businesses chose to relocate to Surfdom and thrived. Unasked and unanswered is the question of what, if anything, is owed to those who didn’t?
Boyack could have chosen an easier subject, like groceries or smartphones, but since he chose roads, we have to contend with the questions that raises. Although Hayek advocated for property rights and free markets in general, he also argued that providing roads and other public services is a legitimate role of government. As Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty,
The rules of property and contract are required to delimit the individual's private sphere wherever the resources or services needed for the pursuit of his aims are scarce and must, in consequence, be under the control of some man or another. But if this is true of most of the benefits we derive from men's efforts, it is not true of all. There are some kinds of services, such as sanitation or roads, which, once they are provided, are normally sufficient for all who want to use them. The provision of such services has long been a recognized field of public effort, and the right to share in them is an important part of the protected sphere of the individual.
This isn’t just a theoretical matter. As Timothy B. Lee at the Cato Institute points out,
the vast majority of “private” roads, around the world and throughout history, came into existence thanks to direct government assistance.
Indeed, examples of truly private roads like the Dulles Greenway are few and far between, and even that one operates under government charter.
Unfortunately for Hayek, the problems Boyack raises are real. While everyone might theoretically benefit from a road, some benefit more than others. In particular, those who own land along a new road benefit handsomely, yet everyone pays for its construction and maintenance. Who gets to decide where to build new roads or how well to maintain old ones? As Boyack suggests, simply voting on this democratically isn’t enough - the majority can and does make decisions that hurt a minority, not to mention that voters are terrible at forecasting the full impact of their decisions.
This topic is near and dear to my heart, as I live on the western edge of Lawrence, and my city is hell-bent on building road, water and sewer infrastructure into unincorporated areas west of here with the intent of annexing them and adding to our tax base. They’re already starting design work on widening the Bob Billings Pkwy in an area that’s currently mostly rural houses and farmland. When you look at property records, you quickly find that a lot of the adjacent land has been bought by corporate investors who stand ready to profit from increasing land values. Meanwhile, the cost of repaying construction bonds and maintaining those new roads will put further upward pressure on mine and my neighbors’ property taxes. And the reality is that, although growing, Lawrence isn’t growing that quickly. Much of the new development out west is likely to displace existing economic activity within Lawrence, lowering property values around those businesses and reducing the tax base. Talk about unintended consequences!
Just as with the ill-conceived STAR bonds that I discussed last month, the real issue here is about how government infrastructure projects privatize benefits while socializing costs. A lot of developers and businesses benefitted from the new road to Surfdom, but they paid no more for it than the property owners in La Playa. If there’s a business case to be made for a road to Surfdom, or a new Chief’s stadium or new infrastructure west of Lawrence, I say let private investors pay for it.
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