Reblogged:Where Are the Flying Cars?

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Writing at the Foundation for Economic Education, economist Alex Tabarrok argues persuasively that, but for government regulations, lots of us would have been commuting via flying car by now.

Tabarrok ably captures the technical feasibility angle with multiple examples, including the nearly century-old footage embedded in this post, and with equal adroitness shows the devastating impact of regulation on the relevant sector of the aviation industry.

It is the lack of will to rid ourselves of preventative law, not technology, that stands in the way.

His most interesting argument he saves for last:

By far the costliest part of the FAA's regulation is not any particular standard imposed on pilot training, liability, or aircraft safety, but a slight shift in the grammatical tense of all these rules. The Department of Transportation (DOT) sets strict safety requirements for cars, but manufacturers are allowed to release new designs without first getting the DOT to sign off that all the requirements have been satisfied. The law is enforced ex post, and the government will impose recalls and fines when manufacturers fail to follow the law.

The FAA, by contrast, enforces all of its safety rules ex ante. Before aircraft manufacturers can do anything with a design, they have to get the FAA's signoff, which can take more than a decade. This regulatory approach also makes the FAA far more risk-averse, since any problems with an aircraft after release are blamed on the FAA's failure to catch them. With ex post enforcement, the companies that failed to follow the law would be blamed, and the FAA rewarded, for enforcing recall.

This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing. [links omitted, bold added]

Without going further, and contesting the propriety or need of such regulations, it is interesting to consider that such a small difference could be so consequential.

On that score, I largely agree with Tabarrok, although I am not as sanguine about the positive effect of making the change he suggests, at least alone. In my admittedly uninformed opinion, I suspect that significant tort reform would also have to occur before we could unleash that torrent of innovation and industry.

Although I doubt we are as tantalizingly close to flying cars as Tabarrok claims, his larger point stands: Our political and legal system stand in the way.

But those arise from our culture, which, as Ayn Rand showed in her work is a consequence of the philosophical ideas championed by the dominant intellectuals and held by the majority in our culture.

That change is probably decades away, if it ever occurs, but if it does, foolishness like this will fall quickly, like so many dominoes.

-- CAV

Link to Original

[EC]

I read this article myself and also assessed the situation in a similar way although the technology has been at the level discussed and is actually much greater in availability. Also we should not be decades away from allowing needed innovation and access to technology of this sort and the proper moral and political principles that underly all of this. This is the job of proper intellectuals to bring us closer to laissez-faire again without any form of mysticism/subjective or other forms of false or evil philosophies that have reinfected modern times. This is why the job of ARI and all Objectivists is to bring reason and correct morality and the sense of life that supports the proper sustainment and advancement of mankind is so important.

 

 

[DavidOdden]

I am all for free market, property rights, no regulation and unfettered capitalism. However, “flying cars” presupposes a resolution to a property puzzle that has only been partially resolved by regulatory fiat: ownership of air rights. I decree that my property right extends 200 miles above my land, and any who trespass on my airspace is subject to a substantial usage fee.

The general matter is discussed in “The property status of airwaves”. There is a huge difference between airwaves and airspace deriving from their physical differences. Airwaves was a newly-discovered existent, a thing of value that was previously unknown and unowned. Airspace has been self-evidence for millennia, and there has existed a substantial body of property law surrounding it. The most ancient legal treatment of property rights states that the owner of the soil owns everything down to Hell and up to the Heavens. Subsequently, every civilized nation has defined more restrictive limits on ownership. Vertical property rights are not part of the property description encoded on the deed, it derives indirectly from whatever law impairs unlimited vertical property rights. In the US, this has resulted in a court-created rule regarding vertical trespass, to the effect that you cannot build a structure hanging over a neighbor’s property, but that vertical right is limited to 350 ft. In major metropolitan areas, sale of that right, which enables “hangover” structures, is a very lucrative business. This 350 ft. definition of vertical property rights is the result of the courts extending the reasoning of a regulation enacted under federal law (the one creating the FAA).

We could, of course, sweep away all impairments of vertical property rights, but that would be an unconstitutional taking – for the law to take from a person a recognized property right, and to negate previous transfers of those rights. Modern commerce is entirely dependent on the existence of a free right to exploit airspace a certain distance above the ground – because it is not individual property subject to legal action against trespassers. Yes, we could, by fiat, sweep away that universal easement for the sake of restoring the old Roman rule, but the old Roman rule itself was a matter of fiat declaration, and does not follow from the Objectivist theory of property rights.

Here is a partial solution. Flying cars require something analogous to roads. We recognize that roads should be private property, and that public roads should be sold to the highest bidder. There already exists a problem of improper taking which demands compensation, that roads are not part of the proper function of government and the land should not have been taken in the first place. A side-effect of solving this problem is that the new owner of the roads not only owns the surface, they own the air right above the road. Air cars and surface cars travel in the same horizontal area, they only differ in vertical placement – which is theoretically unlimited. Well, then we do run into the problem of air transport, because a 767 cannot make a sharp right like a car can. So limits on the ancient Roman concept of property rights will still need to be investigated.

In fact, “flying cars” exist, they are known as “roadable aircraft”, which as aircraft can fly under FAA regulations, and under state laws can (in MI and NH, I predict Oregon will soon follow suit) ply the highways to that they can get to their take-off point. This is not the same as the Jetson’s concept of a flying car. Roadable aircraft only face a rather minor state-level statutory limit on vehicle registration, which has twice been overcome. “Jetson cars” face a more substantial impediment that they cannot be implemented without a substantial overhaul of property concepts, after the legal property framework coming from the Air Commerce Act is swept away and replaced with what? Sure, the underlying article focuses on the real problem of prior restraint, but that is a red herring, the real impediment is the lack of (a) state-level legislative interest in the case of roadable aircraft and (b) anything resembling a rational framework for air space as property. The first is being overcome, the second will remain until we have a rational framework for property law.