Congestion pricing and change rage

A road sign announcing NYC's Congestion Relief Zone

[Previous: Cars shouldn’t be a necessity for living]

I’ve always believed that all interesting moral problems reduce to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Briefly summarized, this is a situation where it’s better for each individual to make the selfish choice. But if everyone does that, it guarantees disaster, whereas everyone would have wound up better off if only they’d been able to cooperate.

To be sure, there are other moral problems that don’t fit this framework, like racists or religious fundamentalists who want to force their own beliefs on everyone. Obviously, with the state of things as they are, these people are huge threats – but at the level of pure philosophy, they present no challenge. It doesn’t take any serious consideration to dismiss them.

The real moral dilemmas arise when there’s a true clash of interests: individuals’ selfish desires against the collective good. Who should sacrifice, and under what circumstances? How do we prevent free-riders and ensure that those who contribute are repaid in kind?

Traffic in big cities is a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma problem. Most people see cars as more convenient than buses or trains, since you can drive on your own schedule and go straight to your destination.

But if everyone thinks that way, the system collapses. No matter how many roads you build, it’s impossible to accommodate everyone wanting to drive everywhere all the time. Massive traffic jams snarl every highway and street, and no one can get anywhere. Too many people choosing the selfish solution ensures a worse experience for everyone than if they had just taken mass transit.

Then there are all the other externalities of car culture. There’s noise pollution that disrupts people’s sleep. There’s air pollution that causes asthma and other health problems. There are the injuries and deaths from crashes and pedestrians hit by reckless drivers. There are the huge swaths of valuable space given over to parking – which raises rents and real-estate prices on the space left over for human beings to live.

This is where congestion pricing comes in.

After months of delay by our cowardly governor, New York has finally rolled out its congestion pricing program. It’s a modest $9 toll to drive into the busiest parts of Manhattan during business hours.

Congestion pricing increases the monetary cost of driving to be more in line with the true cost. It doesn’t take away driving as an option for people who need it. But for those who don’t, it’s an extra nudge to consider walking, biking or mass transit. It also benefits people who have to drive – because they’ll enjoy faster, easier commutes with less traffic.

Even in just a few days, there are encouraging signs that congestion pricing is working. It’s caused a dramatic drop in traffic on previously car-choked streets and bridges. The revenue will fund badly-needed improvements to the subway system.

All in all, congestion pricing is a great example of public policy working as intended. So, predictably, New York Republicans flew into a lather of rage over it.

For example, MAGA city councilwoman Vickie Paladino – yes, a sitting elected official – encouraged people to destroy the cameras that read license plates:

City Councilmember Vickie Paladino, a Republican who represents parts of northeast Queens, wrote on X that “a high-powered green laser pointer like the ones you find on eBay for under $30 can destroy a camera sensor.”

“So if you buy one of these lasers, be sure to NOT point them at any cameras, because they could be permanently damaged!” she added.

When another user on the platform asked if the laser pointers could “take care” of the MTA’s congestion pricing toll readers, Paladino replied with multiple thinking-face emojis.

As you’ll notice, there was no appeal to democracy. Paladino didn’t ask New Yorkers to protest, write letters or call their representatives. She went straight to wink-and-nudge calls for vandalism and destruction of government property. If a Muslim imam or an immigrant had done the same, who can doubt it’d be treated as terrorism?

It would be one thing for people like Paladino to acknowledge the tradeoff, but to argue that individual liberty is supreme and no one should ever have to sacrifice for others. That would be the philosophically consistent libertarian position.

But this is something different. It’s an immediate, knee-jerk fury at the mere idea of changing anything or giving up any privilege you have. Paul Krugman calls it “change rage“:

Yet while cars may be special, there’s a broader syndrome — change rage? — in which a significant number of people go wild at any suggestion that they should change their behavior for the common good. The change doesn’t have to involve major cost or inconvenience; seriously, even masking up during the pandemic wasn’t that big a hardship. It’s more the principle of the thing: How dare you tell me how to live my life?

This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it took off during COVID. The stage was set by decades of conservative anti-intellectualism, which taught their voters to reject science and scorn expertise whenever it didn’t align with what party elites wanted.

Then, when the pandemic hit, the cult of Trumpist Republicans denied there was a problem, because admitting its existence would be a blot on the competence of their Dear Leader. All the anti-mask and anti-vaccine frenzy grew from this starting point.

This oppositional, defiant, “you can’t tell me what to do” attitude has spread to every issue on conservatives’ radar. They rage over replacing polluting gas stoves with clean electric appliances. They take a concept as simple and appealing as the “15-minute city” – the idea that cities should be designed at human scale, so all the amenities you’d want are no more than 15 minutes’ walk – and twist it into a bizarre conspiracy about imprisoning people in their homes. If drunk driving laws or no-smoking zones were proposed today, in our poisoned political atmosphere, I doubt they’d pass.

Democracy can handle the give-and-take of political sausage-making. What it can’t survive is one faction treating every policy it disagrees with as an existential threat. This isn’t just a hardball bargaining tactic. It’s a wholesale rejection of the social contract that makes us a society in the first place.

Image credit: Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

Why libertarian cities fail, part 2

A concrete bunker built into a hillside

[Previous: Why libertarian cities fail]

Ever since Ayn Rand dreamed up Galt’s Gulch, real-life libertarians have been inspired to try building their own utopias of freedom, out from under the thumb of oppressive governments. Over the years, I’ve reported on several of these attempts, mostly for the entertainment value of libertarians learning, too late and to their cost, why the state exists.

I’ve written about “Galt’s Gulch Chile“, a real-estate venture that pitched itself as a haven of freedom, but collapsed in a dust cloud of lawsuits as investors and developers accused each other of fraud.

More recently, I reported on the wildcat community of Rio Verde Foothills in Arizona, which found a clever way to skirt regulations about water, only to discover, to their surprise and dismay, that human beings still need water.

Now there’s yet another wannabe libertarian utopia. This time, it’s Vivos xPoint, a planned community in rural South Dakota.

It was originally the Black Hills Ordnance Depot, an complex of bunkers built by the Army for munitions storage during World War II. The military vacated the base in 1967, and the bunkers sat empty for years, until the land was bought by Vivos, a real-estate company. Vivos’ raison d’etre is redeveloping military-surplus bomb shelters and missile silos into luxury bunkers for rich preppers:

The owner and operator of Vivos xPoint, California businessman Robert K. Vicino, told News Watch that he has had great success in leasing more than 200 of the bunkers so far and that the project is highly successful and profitable.

Vicino also said the bunker complex has evolved into a thriving community of like-minded people, most of whom are happy to live there and support one another while realizing their dream of a self-sustainable lifestyle in an area relatively safe from disasters or potential ills that could endanger society and the world.

Let’s hear more about the kind of person who’d plan a project like this:

Vicino said he first became interested in developing or selling survival bunkers in 1982. Vicino said he heard a female voice in his head clearly tell him that, “Robert, you need to build underground bunkers or shelters for thousands of people to survive what is coming,” he said. “I attributed it to the Holy Spirit.”

According to another article, his son Dante Vicino agrees:

The name of the game at Vivos xPoint, Vicino said, is freedom, freedom, and more freedom. And lots of privacy: The bunkers are spaced about 400 feet apart, each one bounded by a 30-foot perimeter.

Within that space, tenants can do pretty much whatever they please within the lease, whether raising a garden, building a hothouse, or creating a small parking area or garage.

“…South Dakota is a sanctuary state for conservative people, military veterans, and police officers. Everybody that’s getting thrown under the bus by all the left-wing [activity] that’s happening. They’re all welcome here,” Vicino said.

Vivos markets itself to wealthy buyers who believe the collapse of civilization is imminent. Their pitch is that the development is remote and well-protected enough to ride out any catastrophe:

The Vivos website says the South Dakota bunker site will be safe from “the marauders during the aftermath of a large-scale cataclysm or catastrophic event.” The site has a U.S. map showing that southwestern South Dakota is outside the range of submersion areas along the coasts, known nuclear targets, the Yellowstone blast zone and “high-crime anarchy zones.”

Am I too cynical for suspecting that the list of “high-crime anarchy zones” includes anywhere non-white people live?

Vicino says he envisioned a peaceful community of respect, cooperation and tolerance. However, unlike the inexplicably harmonious Galt’s Gulch, it hasn’t gone so smoothly. It turns out, when you assemble a self-selected community of distrustful survivalists, paranoid preppers, and gun lovers, all drawn by the promise of getting to do what they want… they don’t get along with each other.

According to the article, Vivos and its residents have been furiously suing each other. There have been complaints to the attorney general and at least one FBI inquiry. Residents have alleged a long list of broken promises: no security, no road maintenance, no trash pickup, no water. And then there’s this eyebrow-raising rule:

Vivos uses a 99-year lease agreement, so residents do not legally own their bunkers.

…Lessees sign a 14-page lease and eight-page list of community rules, and those who don’t pay or violate the rules can be evicted. One rule states that Vivos residents are forbidden from talking to the media about the bunker complex or the company under the threat of fines or possible eviction.

Remember, you move to this place because you love freedom! Now just sign on this dotted line that says you relinquish your First Amendment rights.

This isn’t an aberration. Time and again, libertarians claim to value freedom above all else – but when you look at their planned communities, they invariably have one person or a small elite ruling with absolute power. In my 2016 post “On Seasteading and Liberlands“, I wrote about the proposed “Freedom Ship” whose captain would have been a dictator with an armed private security force.

In 2017, in “The One Percent Embraces Doomsday“, I mentioned another survival project pitched at preppers built into a decommissioned missile silo. It came with the stipulation that the board of directors can force people to labor, prevent them from leaving, and imprison them at will.

Vivos xPoint’s anti-free-speech rules aren’t obscure fine print that no one cares about. They’re being enforced. Residents claim that if they complain, talk to the media, or file suit over living conditions, Vivos evicts them – while keeping all the money they paid up front for that “99-year” lease.

(Interestingly, this mirrors a scenario from Atlas Shrugged. In my review, I asked why banker Midas Mulligan sells land in Galt’s Gulch rather than just renting it, allowing him to profit while keeping control. Vivos has done that exact thing, as real self-interested capitalists should.)

Astonishingly, it gets worse. According to multiple accounts, people who live there are afraid of the staff hired to work at the complex. Many of these complaints center around a worker named Kelly Anderson:

Anderson was shot in the chest during an August confrontation with Streeter, a former Vivos xPoint resident who is fighting his eviction. Streeter said he shot Anderson in self-defense after Anderson threatened Streeter and his family. Anderson, who was unarmed at the time of the confrontation, sent threatening messages about harming Streeter to an acquaintance just prior to the shooting, according to text messages records obtained by News Watch.

According to that text log, Anderson wrote: “I’m about to f— his ass up,” and “What he did isn’t right and I’m gonna educate this mother f—.”

…Bunker resident Rich Roehm said he always carries a .357 handgun but that after the August shooting, he removed the “snake shot” cartridges and replaced them with hollow-point bullets with far more stopping power. Roehm called Anderson, the subcontractor who lives and works at Vivos xPoint, “dangerous.”

…All four residents interviewed by News Watch during an October visit to the site carried handguns for protection.

This is a huge irony that I doubt any of the residents appreciate. They bought these bunkers because they want to be safe from the chaos of the outside world… but it seems the biggest danger they face is from the other people at the complex with them.

This is a lesson that libertarians stubbornly resist learning. They want to be free of the state, to move to a place where nobody’s rules will be imposed on them. But when you try to get away from democracy and all its safeguards, you don’t get rid of authority. It just winds up in the hands of people who have all the power and none of the accountability.

New on OnlySky: The coming drone wars

I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about the future of war, and how humans are playing less of a role in it.

In the Russia-Ukraine war, Ukraine’s use of drones has been a force multiplier, allowing them to hold out against the numerically superior Russian army and even score some important strategic victories. We can be sure that military planners all over the world are paying close attention. It’s a glimpse of the future of war: not small numbers of high-tech, uber-expensive fighter jets or warships, but massive swarms of cheap drones that can be used for reconnaissance or to deliver pinpoint strikes.

In this case, drone technology has helped defend democracy against the invasion of an autocratic foe. But it’s not necessarily a development we should cheer. It’s all too possible that drones will make wars of the future cheaper, less risky, and therefore more common.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

So far, most drones have been used as kamikaze weapons—essentially, smart artillery shells that can home in on a target—or for reconnaissance to guide artillery strikes. But as the war drags on, they’re becoming larger, smarter and more capable. Like the Baba Yaga, they’re evolving into weapons platforms in their own right.

The newest iteration of Ukraine’s sea-going Magura drones carry anti-aircraft missiles. In a spectacular demonstration of how much the technology has advanced, one of them recently shot down a Russian helicopter. And, coming soon, the next generation of Ukraine’s ground-based drones will have grenade launchers and machine guns. They’ll be able to fight alongside infantry on the front lines.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

FFRF and Jerry Coyne: Atheists for human rights, or atheists for the religious right?

Once again, the secular community has been split by Deep Rifts. In a pattern we should all be familiar with by now, the clash is between a younger generation that’s more enlightened than the past, versus an ossified old guard, blind to their own prejudices, that joins hands with the religious right to oppose moral progress.

The story began when the Freedom from Religion Foundation published a column by legal fellow Kat Grant, “What is a woman?“, pointing out that society’s views on gender have been shaped by Christian dogma:

In much of the modern United States, gender is viewed through the lens of the religious traditions that were brought by European colonizers. Missionaries often viewed gender systems outside of the strict sexual binary to be a mark of a “less civilized” nation, and imposed views of both gender and presentation (such as forcing boys in residential schools to cut their hair) onto the indigenous communities. Catholic explorer Jacques Marquette wrote in 1674:

I do not know by what superstition some Illiniwek, as well as some Sioux, take on women’s clothing while still young, and keep it all their lives: there is some mystery, as they never get married, and lower themselves by doing everything that women do… they are called to the council, where nothing may be decided without their advice; finally, their claim of living an extraordinary life lets them pass for manitous, that is to say great spirits, or important people. (Translation by Hamish Copley)

In response, Jerry Coyne, a member of the FFRF’s honorary board, asked and received permission to publish a rebuttal. In it, he argues that sex isn’t a spectrum but a binary (not true). He acknowledges the existence of intersex people, but insists they don’t count:

Nowhere else in biology would deviations this rare undermine a fundamental concept. To illustrate, as many as 1 in 300 people are born with some form of polydactyly — without the normal number of ten fingers. Nevertheless, nobody talks about a “spectrum of digit number.”

Can Coyne really not see why sex and gender are of concern to progressives but digit number isn’t?

If the religious right was claiming that only people with ten fingers are normal, and that anyone with a different number of fingers is a freak who shouldn’t be allowed to teach children (“it will confuse them!”) or get married, or hold elected office… then yes, we’d be justified in pointing out that digit number is a spectrum and not a fixed value! Until then, we’re arguing against the harmful beliefs that people really hold, not merely hypothetical forms of prejudice.

Most shocking, Coyne argues that transgender people are more criminal than cisgender people:

Transgender [sic], then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders.

This is Bigotry 101. It’s exactly the same as racists saying that Black people are all criminals because more of them are imprisoned than white people, or Trumpist tabloids shrieking about every crime committed by an immigrant, or Christian conservatives demanding that every mosque be put under police surveillance because fundamentalist Muslims have committed acts of terrorism.

Coyne makes this argument without considering confounding factors – like the fact that minorities tend to get singled out for biased enforcement and unjust prosecution. For example, transgender people have been arrested for prostitution just for carrying condoms.

Publishing this article was a mistake on FFRF’s part. However, they realized this quickly and made it right by taking down Coyne’s article and publishing an unequivocal statement of support for LGBTQ rights.

In a snit, Coyne, as well as Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, quit the FFRF’s honorary board. So be it. If they want to consign themselves to crankery and irrelevance, that’s their choice.

Dawkins and Coyne are biologists, and perhaps they think that gives them special authority in this area, but it doesn’t. This isn’t a debate about biology, but about the social roles we assign to gender and the way we should treat people who don’t conform to stereotypes. Should your chromosomes, or gametes, or genitals be the determining factor for what careers you’re encouraged to pursue, or how you’re expected to dress, or what your role is in the household? I say no.

As I’ve written before, you’d think these big-name atheists would feel disquiet that their view on sex and gender is exactly the same as the religious right’s. But they don’t. In fact, Coyne airily dismisses the idea – “the FFRF has a remarkable ability to place any kind of antiwoke ideology under the rubric of ‘Christian nationalism'” – which demonstrates willful blindness to the fact that this is a crusade by Christian nationalists.

Anti-transgender bathroom bills and bans on gender-affirming therapy are top agenda items for the religious right. Coyne can’t admit that obvious fact, because then he’d have to recognize whose side he’s on.

In fact, Coyne and others aren’t just echoing the opinions of the religious right, but their priorities. Whatever you think about transgender people, a fair assessment would have to conclude that they’re not a threat to anyone, certainly not the way that religious fundamentalism is. Yet by making opposition to transgender rights their shibboleth, Coyne, Dawkins and Pinker are signaling that they consider it a cause more important even than atheism or church-state separation.

As any freethinker should know, religious conservatives have a long record of whipping up mob panic against minorities to advance their own agenda. It used to be gay people. It used to be atheists. But both those groups have won greater social acceptance, so bigots have moved on to the next disfavored group they can sow prejudice against. The FFRF recognizes this, but Coyne and others don’t. Instead, they’re adding their voices in support of this regressive and hateful brand of fundamentalism.