[Previous: Cars shouldn’t be a necessity for living]

I’ve always believed that all interesting moral problems reduce to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Briefly summarized, this is a situation where it’s better for each individual to make the selfish choice. But if everyone does that, it guarantees disaster, whereas everyone would have wound up better off if only they’d been able to cooperate.

To be sure, there are other moral problems that don’t fit this framework, like racists or religious fundamentalists who want to force their own beliefs on everyone. Obviously, with the state of things as they are, these people are huge threats – but at the level of pure philosophy, they present no challenge. It doesn’t take any serious consideration to dismiss them.

The real moral dilemmas arise when there’s a true clash of interests: individuals’ selfish desires against the collective good. Who should sacrifice, and under what circumstances? How do we prevent free-riders and ensure that those who contribute are repaid in kind?

Traffic in big cities is a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma problem. Most people see cars as more convenient than buses or trains, since you can drive on your own schedule and go straight to your destination.

But if everyone thinks that way, the system collapses. No matter how many roads you build, it’s impossible to accommodate everyone wanting to drive everywhere all the time. Massive traffic jams snarl every highway and street, and no one can get anywhere. Too many people choosing the selfish solution ensures a worse experience for everyone than if they had just taken mass transit.

Then there are all the other externalities of car culture. There’s noise pollution that disrupts people’s sleep. There’s air pollution that causes asthma and other health problems. There are the injuries and deaths from crashes and pedestrians hit by reckless drivers. There are the huge swaths of valuable space given over to parking – which raises rents and real-estate prices on the space left over for human beings to live.

This is where congestion pricing comes in.

After months of delay by our cowardly governor, New York has finally rolled out its congestion pricing program. It’s a modest $9 toll to drive into the busiest parts of Manhattan during business hours.

Congestion pricing increases the monetary cost of driving to be more in line with the true cost. It doesn’t take away driving as an option for people who need it. But for those who don’t, it’s an extra nudge to consider walking, biking or mass transit. It also benefits people who have to drive – because they’ll enjoy faster, easier commutes with less traffic.

Even in just a few days, there are encouraging signs that congestion pricing is working. It’s caused a dramatic drop in traffic on previously car-choked streets and bridges. The revenue will fund badly-needed improvements to the subway system.

All in all, congestion pricing is a great example of public policy working as intended. So, predictably, New York Republicans flew into a lather of rage over it.

For example, MAGA city councilwoman Vickie Paladino – yes, a sitting elected official – encouraged people to destroy the cameras that read license plates:

City Councilmember Vickie Paladino, a Republican who represents parts of northeast Queens, wrote on X that “a high-powered green laser pointer like the ones you find on eBay for under $30 can destroy a camera sensor.”

“So if you buy one of these lasers, be sure to NOT point them at any cameras, because they could be permanently damaged!” she added.

When another user on the platform asked if the laser pointers could “take care” of the MTA’s congestion pricing toll readers, Paladino replied with multiple thinking-face emojis.

As you’ll notice, there was no appeal to democracy. Paladino didn’t ask New Yorkers to protest, write letters or call their representatives. She went straight to wink-and-nudge calls for vandalism and destruction of government property. If a Muslim imam or an immigrant had done the same, who can doubt it’d be treated as terrorism?

It would be one thing for people like Paladino to acknowledge the tradeoff, but to argue that individual liberty is supreme and no one should ever have to sacrifice for others. That would be the philosophically consistent libertarian position.

But this is something different. It’s an immediate, knee-jerk fury at the mere idea of changing anything or giving up any privilege you have. Paul Krugman calls it “change rage“:

Yet while cars may be special, there’s a broader syndrome — change rage? — in which a significant number of people go wild at any suggestion that they should change their behavior for the common good. The change doesn’t have to involve major cost or inconvenience; seriously, even masking up during the pandemic wasn’t that big a hardship. It’s more the principle of the thing: How dare you tell me how to live my life?

This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it took off during COVID. The stage was set by decades of conservative anti-intellectualism, which taught their voters to reject science and scorn expertise whenever it didn’t align with what party elites wanted.

Then, when the pandemic hit, the cult of Trumpist Republicans denied there was a problem, because admitting its existence would be a blot on the competence of their Dear Leader. All the anti-mask and anti-vaccine frenzy grew from this starting point.

This oppositional, defiant, “you can’t tell me what to do” attitude has spread to every issue on conservatives’ radar. They rage over replacing polluting gas stoves with clean electric appliances. They take a concept as simple and appealing as the “15-minute city” – the idea that cities should be designed at human scale, so all the amenities you’d want are no more than 15 minutes’ walk – and twist it into a bizarre conspiracy about imprisoning people in their homes. If drunk driving laws or no-smoking zones were proposed today, in our poisoned political atmosphere, I doubt they’d pass.

Democracy can handle the give-and-take of political sausage-making. What it can’t survive is one faction treating every policy it disagrees with as an existential threat. This isn’t just a hardball bargaining tactic. It’s a wholesale rejection of the social contract that makes us a society in the first place.

Image credit: Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license