Letters

From the June 2005 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

Describing Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) systems as "taxis on monorail tracks" gets to the heart of the matter in a hurry. While overhead, monorail-style, is the preferred route, it's certainly not the only one. Given their light weight and quiet operation, PRT vehicles could pass through apartment buildings, malls, and office buildings.

Also, eminent domain need not apply to PRT projects. Existing road and utility rights of way should suffice for the guideways. Malls, apartment complexes, and office buildings will be attracted to sponsor stations and should therefore pay for them and the connection costs, though I am sure the route choices will be subject to the usual corrupt political system.

Libertarians could be an important part of the development of PRT, which I consider inevitable. It is a solution and a technology whose time has come. It works well in combination with existing transit modes, it is economical, and, perhaps most important, it is desirable. If we who know the pitfalls of public control stay away from this most promising of transit alternatives, we will cede the ground to the statists who wish to use mass transit as a form of punishment for our environmental sins.

Hugh A. Butler
Salt Lake City, UT

John Locke, Original Hipster

Thank you for publishing Nick Gillespie's piece on my book Counterculture Through the Ages ("John Locke, Original Hipster," March). I always felt the book's narration of sometimes admittedly flimsy connections between various cultural epochs and movements that held similar concepts and spirits hinged on the chapter about the Enlightenment, and Gillespie precisely nailed my intentions.

I would, however, like to correct one misapprehension. Gillespie says I have apparent sympathies for eco-terrorists. To my mind, eco-terrorists are the people who burn down housing developments they don't like, or threaten violence against workers at companies that do animal testing, or send mail bombs to mid-level technoserfs and college professors. I hate them. This shouldn't require any explanation.

Gillespie is referring to a segment in the final chapter about the anti-authoritarian branch of the environmentalist movement that, in my opinion, had to be acknowledged as a counterculture within the context of the book. While I have big problems with the neo-Luddite purist tendencies of this movement (and I ridicule them for their purism in the book), I do admire the way the eco-anarchists organize themselves by consensus, without authority or hierarchy.

I also share some views with this "new hip left." Where some readers of Reason may see a free market, I see much more of a corporate oligarchy. Also, I think we may be muddling towards a less coercive, more decentralized future largely because of the collaborative skills and gift economy sensibilities that we are developing online through the open source movement, file sharing, and the like.

Here, market interests use excessive intellectual property rights as defined and enforced by state power and the legal system to maintain stasis while those less concerned with market values produce revolutionary change within a libertarian (nonstatist) context.

While I generally try not to over-identify with any wing in a fast-moving vehicle, I suspect that the libertarian future (if any) leans a bit to the left--toward networked voluntary collaboration on a grand scale.

Ken Goffman (a.k.a. R.U. Sirius)
Mill Valley, CA

The Fever Swamps of Kansas

Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas? and Jesse Walker's review of it ("The Fever Swamps of Kansas," March) both miss the essence of this heartland state located in the middle of flyover country.

Frank misses how Democrats have actually won the Kansas governor's mansion 24 of the last 40 years but have not elected a U.S. senator since the 1930s.

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