Greening London’s transport
Libertarians and progressives seldom share the same political platform but that does not mean they cannot share the same policy goals. A surprising example from recent history can be found in the United Kingdom. In 2003, the stridently far-left progressive Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, introduced a flat-rate congestion charge for inner London roads directly inspired by Milton Friedman’s approach to road pricing (Beckett 2003). It is a classic compromise between libertarian and progressive instincts. Some libertarians might ideally prefer all transport networks to be privately built and managed. Some progressives would prefer eventually to ban private cars altogether in favor of public transport. The London Congestion Charge meets both halfway by putting a price on road use and thus facilitating the efficient use of a public resource.
The congestion charge is based on sound economic reasoning as it permits subjectively highly valued road trips but better ensures their resulting externalities are paid for. It also encourages substitution into alternative forms of transport where possible. It rejects the assumption that favored lifestyles should be subsidised with open-access infrastructure. Consequently, the charge has improved travel times in London and increased public revenue while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as injuries and fatalities on London’s roads (Leape 2006). It has formed the basis for further incentives for the adoption of hybrid and electric vehicles. Conservatives, who are more likely to be car-owners, initially opposed road pricing. However, the policy was so successful that, when he took over as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson had little choice but to lean into the trend set by his predecessor and implement a popular bike sharing scheme.
Although this example is from one city in the United Kingdom, progressive governing coalitions throughout the world have drawn on libertarian proposals since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Indeed, more egalitarian regimes have often implemented neoliberal ideas more faithfully and fairly than their right-wing counterparts (Bergh 2020; Cowen 2008, 2021; Sumner 2010). The overall result has been a substantial reduction in global poverty to the point that it has finally become an experience of the minority of humanity rather than the majority (Milanović 2016; Shleifer 2009).
Ecological sustainability as a shared challenge
The success and popularity of the congestion charge reflects a growing concern with ecological sustainability. Mass poverty was the great problem of the twentieth century that both progressive and libertarian policies helped to ameliorate. The twenty-first century presents a new challenge to humanity: meeting people’s material needs in ways that are compatible with maintaining the natural world (Raworth 2017). Here, progressives have been more effective at identifying resource depletion, climate change and over-population as primary challenges (Hardin 1968). During the twentieth century, by contrast, libertarians were decidedly cool on these problems (Lomborg 2007; Simon 1989). They saw environmental concerns as a distraction from the imperative to pursue growth and a justification for increased state control of the economy. Libertarians argued that the spontaneous forces of the market and civil society would be sufficient to resolve environmental problems.
Only slices of this optimistic perspective have turned out to be justified. For example, the global rise in living standards and education levels has led to a spontaneous drop in fertility with the result that population growth is less likely to be a serious issue (Connors, Gwartney, and Montesinos‐Yufa 2020). But climbing average global temperatures, the melting of the polar icecaps and the shocking increase in floods and wildfires has shown that climate-change scepticism was a serious error. At the same time, systematically adapting our societies toward environmental sustainability presents intrinsic complexities that mean that simple directives and regulation from central government are likely to falter (Pennington 2013; Shahar 2015, 2017). So, what can a libertarian appreciation of market forces bring to this challenge (cf. Cowen 2020)?
Prospects for neoliberal environmentalism
There are several policy lessons at the intersection of libertarian and progressive thought that can help meet these challenges. A first is the power of basic economic reasoning when seeking to align our lifestyles with environmental imperatives. An observation from classical political economy is that permitting the spontaneous growth of cities improves productivity through facilitating the division of labor and providing a larger market for specialised products and services. This effect of agglomeration is particularly important for pursuing environmental goals. Bringing people to live closer together means there is more opportunity for trade and cooperation with less energy expended in transporting people and goods. There can be less waste and loss in the process of transacting.
More significantly, urban density allows for more joint consumption of common and club goods which means people can live comfortably and pleasurably in space-efficient and energy-efficient residences. Rather than each household taking a hefty slice of nature for itself in the form of a detached house (with multiple rooms all in need of heating and air-conditioning), private cars, driveways, and yards, many more people can live in city apartments with communal gyms, common parks, and with amenities accessible on foot and by public transport. The result is a smaller ecological footprint with a great deal more space freed up for environmental recovery.
A second lesson is the capacity for free enterprise to drive innovation in sustainability. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed the stunning capacity for business and civil society to adapt to economic shocks and meet new human needs. The virus itself provoked the rapid implementation and production of mRNA vaccines. The unexpected need to engage in physical distancing encouraged many workers to switch to working from home, demonstrating the capacity of Internet communication to replace many environmentally costly in-person activities. With such efficiencies now discovered, it is unlikely that the post-pandemic world will see everyone switch back to working in offices with the result that a great deal of the built environment can be reconfigured for more efficient uses or returned to nature.
What the pandemic shows is that if incentives are appropriately aligned, private actors can be enormously inventive problem solvers. Just a few years ago, the aim of net-zero carbon emission economies would have seemed fanciful. Now, the dramatic drop in the production costs of solar panels, the improvement of battery technology and the rapid emergence of artificial meat is making such an aim plausible if not quite yet within reach of developed economies. This suggests that simple and general carbon taxes, evenly enforced, could do a great deal to encourage market actors to pursue environmental efficiencies and bring our developed world living standards in line with our pressing need to avert catastrophic climate change.
The third lesson is institutional. People living sustainably and in closer proximity requires refined governance arrangements to manage the externalities and public utilities that urban living necessitates. What sort of institutional environment produces governance that is more conducive to living well together? Here, progressives tend to emphasise the need for democratic government to provide for popular accountability combined with expert administrators to effectively implement and manage policy. By contrast, libertarians emphasise the value of property rights (Cai et al. 2020; Harris et al. 2020) and capacity of individuals to discipline governments through the power of exit (Pennington 2017; Taylor 2017). London’s experience suggest that societies need a mix of both: strong representative local democratic political institutions combined with polycentricity, federalism and market institutions at the scale of the broader economic community (Aligică, Boettke, and Tarko 2019). The presence of market institutions furnishes local policymakers with the knowledge of the scarcity and demands for resources elsewhere in the economy (Cowen and Delmotte 2020). Democratic institutions incentivise political leaders to justify their policies to everyone effected and federalism allows for policy experimentation and for citizens to select their preferred configurations of public goods. While some libertarian theorists see democracy as an impediment to good governance (Brennan 2016), especially to the working of the market, there is a strong case that democracy and markets are more likely to support one another (Trantidis and Cowen 2020). Likewise, there is a strong case to be made that libertarian and progressive instincts are complements.
*
Avoiding long-term environmental collapse is a fearsome task for humanity, possibly the greatest we have ever collectively faced. To meet this task, we must be prepared to challenge our own instincts and intuitions about what is politically possible and desirable (Geuss 2010). One way or another, our lifestyles will change radically in the next few decades; indeed, even our conception of what the good life is will change. Yet, we cannot help but look at political choices through our enduring ideological lenses. We cannot reason from nowhere, without a starting point (Buchanan 1999). To gain a better vantage point, what we can do is look through multiple lenses and this is where looking at this problem simultaneously through progressive and libertarian frames can help. We can survive and thrive if we are prepared to accept and act on the knowledge that those holding different values to us hold.
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