Flutterby™! : Free parking is not a free market 2014-05-05 22:11:10.836228+00

Free parking is not a free market

2014-05-05 22:11:10.836228+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

Libertarian activists invade New Hampshire town to harass meter officers in their quest for socialist parking: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05...ling-town-live-free-or-else.html

The linked article, New York Times: Libertarians Trail Meter Readers, Telling Town: Live Free or Else, is about the friction between residents of Keene, NH, and those who moved there as a part of the "Free State Project".

But some local residents are speaking out in their stead by challenging the activists through a Facebook page with the unwieldy name of “Stop Free Keene!!!” One of its organizers, Andrea Parkhurst Whitcomb, is asking the relative newcomers a fundamental question:

“Who asked you to come free us?”

I wonder if it has been pointed out to the "Free Keene" activists that the town is a corporation, the bylaws of that corporation dictate how the officers of the corporation are elected and how decisions get made, and that if that corporation weren't formed with a charter that demands free and open access to that process and its grounds, they'd just be run off for trespassing.

I think the New York Times is using the label because the assorted self-described members of the Free State Project are using the label. And, frankly, many of the self-described Libertarians in my social media today have been holding up these jokers as heroes.

I suspect that Libertarians and libertarians, and at this point even just economic conservatives, are going to have to figure out how to reclaim the term and the field, much as Christians have been struggling with in the past decade or three. Or abandon it and move on.

SPC476, I appreciate the </sarcasm> tag there but in this case I have to answer it anyway. No, libertarians have no real problem with government from what I can tell, they have a problem with an intrusive, reactive government. I've always thought libertarians were strong supporters of contracts made between individuals and groups with one of the more important contracts being the constitution that defines a government. I think libertarians are only opposed to governments that operate outsides of the confines of the contract.

While Libertarians, on the third hand, seem to just oppose government taxation and the prohibition of drug use.

I think it's very easy for people (like me, I was there, let's be fair) to get caught up in an ideologically pure notion of a political structure and ignore the practical elements, the things like fact that inheritance coupled with real estate ownership leads to monarchy, and that the cost of suppressing violent behavior is often much higher (both economically and socially) than the cost of education.

I think what you probably have in people who are after the "Free State Project" is people who don't have enough of an investment in their own community that they feel a need to stay put, and don't have enough of an economic prospect linked to geography that they want to live in a big urban area. So it's the drifters who can live anywhere and don't need to live somewhere specific.

These are, by and large, not the people who are going to build the culture upon which the new economy will rest.