David McElroy

When governments create problems and shortages, the free market rushes in to try to give people what they need. But in the face of almost every innovation, there are politicians and their corrupt friends in the private sector trying to make sure nobody upsets the status quo.

Do you ever take taxis? I rarely do, but I find the experience unpleasant when I have to. You call a dispatcher — who’s frequently surly and unpleasant — and then wait for a cab driver to show up. You might get a decent driver or you might get a jerk who’s unpleasant to deal with. Then you’re taken to where you want to go, at which point you pay a fee that some government bureaucrat set — very possibly in collusion with the people who own the taxis.

In many cities, there aren’t even cabs to meet the demand. There are set numbers of permits available for taxis and nobody can legally go into business without one of the permits. The people who own the existing permits fight to prevent more permits from being issued, because they don’t want competition. They like a world in which a government agency decides how many people can be in the business. That way, they don’t have to use things such as better services and lower prices to compete for business. (Actually, they’re prohibited from charging lower prices.)

There’s a free market solution to this terrible situation, but politicians and bureaucrats are trying to kill it. There are new smartphone apps — Lyft, Sidecar and Uber — that allow anyone to get a ride from someone who has a car that’s registered with the service. If you need a ride, you tell the app what you need and the app tells you who’s available. You choose your driver (and car) and that person picks you up. At the destination, you’re given a suggested “donation” and you’re allowed to rate the driver.

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Is there anybody who hasn’t felt the need at some point to get away from the insane world and escape to a place of relative sanity? I feel it a lot, and I’ve been feeling it more strongly again recently. It’s occurred to me that I don’t really need Galt’s Gulch right now. I need to find my own version of Hugh Akston’s diner.

If you’re a fan of “Atlas Shrugged,” you know what the two represent. Galt’s Gulch was a brand new society, cut off from the mainstream world — existing without outsiders’ knowledge. It had been founded to give the world’s productive people a place they could go to escape the “looters” who were taking their money and their ideas.

The diner that Dr. Hugh Akston ran, on the other hand, was a part of the mainstream world, in plain view of everyone. Akston had been a philosophy professor who found the world uninterested in his ideas, so he was forced to retreat from university teaching and run a small, remote diner in Colorado. The two places represented entirely different things. Galt’s Gulch was an entirely new free world. Akston’s diner was all about living honestly within the existing world until you could get to the new world.

I want to live in Galt’s Gulch. I want that new world to exist. I believe it’s possible, and I believe we’re going to build it. In the meantime, though, I have to live in the same old world that everybody else does. And if I’m going to remain sane, that requires finding my own version of Akston’s diner.

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If there’s one thing that most conservatives and libertarians agree on, it’s about the gospel of privatization. Both groups agree that everyone is better off when governments contract with private companies to perform services.

If you look at the Reason Foundation’s website, you can find all about the glories of privatization and why it’s better than having government employees perform the work.

You’ll see praise of privatizing public works, garbage collection, lotteries and airport screening, among others. I’m sure the facts of the reports and studies are accurate as far as they go, but they’re missing the most basic point, as far as I’m concerned.

If I am forced by a city or state to fork over the money to pay for paving roads or collecting trash or maintaining public parks, how much does it matter to me whether the employees who do the work are government employees or on the payroll of a company that I’m required to support, whether I like the work or not?

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been noticing horribly incompetent companies I deal with lately. That’s made me wonder why I should prefer dealing with one of them — if I didn’t have any choice in the matter — rather than government employees. Why is an incompetent private company with a monopoly any better than an incompetent government?

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