pop quiz!
Q: Given that free and unrestricted travel is a natural right, how can the government have the authority to construct and enforce traffic lights at public intersections?
- There are ancient societal rules on how to proceed through intersections. They predate formal government. Regulations covering what a government can and can’t do don’t apply to things that people were doing to themselves before government came along and which their current government now only monitors and maintains.
- In practice, governments are allowed to do anything that people let them. And people let the government erect traffic lights. So it can. (Why they let the government do this is irrelevant to this question.)
- The vast majority of citizens voluntarily waives a tiny piece of natural freedom in exchange for (perceived) personal benefit. This is how all government authority works, really.
- Traffic lights don’t restrict your liberties. They do not impinge on your general right to travel. They don’t even limit your freedom to use particular roads.
- Traffic lights are obviously allowed because if they weren’t, we wouldn’t have them.
- Your premise is false. Free and unrestricted travel is not a natural right.
- Traffic lights impose delays on you, yes, but these delays are demonstrably shorter, on average, than the delays you’d suffer if the lights didn’t exist. If you fixate on the distinction that the delay from traffic lights is caused by government while the delay of a chaotic, unregulated intersection is due to your fellow citizens, you’ll miss this key point.
- Intersections would be dangerous and chaotic without traffic lights. We need them and should have them regardless of philosophical technicalities that only academics care about.