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Thanks for your response. Your objections contain a number of understandable misconceptions about the car culture and mass-transit and indicate how little intelligent, educated Americans really understand about the underpinnings of the car culture, for example, how much their government now massively subsidizes cars--yes--your government--Federal, state, and local--massively subsidizes cars so that they seem much more economical than they really are and disincentivizes mass transit in myriad ways so that it seems now so unattractive and clumsy. The reality is that the "economics of transport" are now "artificially distorted" in favor of the car. The free market as a natural balancer of costs and benefits does not operate. This is THE central insight that needs to be understood. I am no expert on this, but later tonight or this weekend I will post excerpts from Jane Kay's book that I hope will make this clearer to those who are open-minded. I highly recommend this book, as well as the other book I've mentioned, George Kennan's Around the Cragged Hill . Both these authors are sober, intelligent, conservative people of good sense. This car issue is not a conservative or liberal one--you can marshal sound arguments for it from either perspective. Really. You know, in a real sense, concern for the environment and the architecture and texture of our lives in cities and towns and country is an archetypal conservative issue. Conservatism often gets confused with unrestrained 19th century economic liberalism, resulting in incoherence. |
