Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Freedom of Movement is not in the Constitution per se, it's a derived guarantee, meaning The Courts made it up. It bars needing “papers” to move, or denying benefits based on location, gives access to public beaches, and pretty much built the freeway system. It was also used to justify the Disability Act, and is always in the back of the minds of erstwhile urban planners as leverage to force everyone into their public transportation fantasies.

For half of the population, Freedom of Movement means cars, but for the other half it means mass transit. We can’t have a one-sided, rich-people view of our transportation needs, but and it’s also unclear what amount of transportation people are owed? If the debate was about the concept of free movement rather than specific implementations, like Light Rail, other solutions that involve the private sector seem the most promising, especially utilizing today’s information technology.

One particularly venal restriction of Freedom of Movement is tolling, especially tolling of bridge crossings, another is the privatization of roadways. These are egregious examples of how The Rich exploit everyone else: The Rich pay relatively low tolls for fast access on roadways subsidized by all the people packed onto the public lanes, and bridge tolling is primarily a mechanism for city planners to put their populace under the control of bureaucratic elites.

Freedom of Movement facilitates Capitalism because it allows the best allocation of underutilized human capital to migrate to burgeoning job centers. This concept clashes with socialists who do not like the responsibility of pursuing their own careers but think society owes them the contentment of staying in one place their whole lives.