The Wildlife Crossing Is Government Infrastructure That Works: A Libertarian Acknowledges the Exceptions to Antistatism

When Market Failures Are Genuine and Public Goods Are Real, Infrastructure Like the Agoura Hills Corridor Crossing Demonstrates the Limits of Pure Antistatism

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

AGOURA HILLS, California — The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which is nearing completion over Highway 101 in Agoura Hills after years of planning and an $18 million investment combining private philanthropy and public funding, is going to allow mountain lions to cross a ten-lane freeway that has been genetically isolating the Santa Monica Mountains population for decades. It is genuinely good infrastructure. It will do what it is designed to do. The mountain lions will eventually use it. The genetic connectivity it enables will, over generations, reduce the inbreeding depression that currently threatens the population’s long-term viability. The libertarian case against it is weak, and the libertarian tradition of intellectual honesty requires acknowledging this rather than reflexively criticizing government infrastructure that serves a genuine public good that market mechanisms did not and could not have produced.

Why the Market Did Not Build This

The wildlife crossing addresses a market failure of the textbook type: the highway that fragmented the mountain lion habitat was built by government. The ecological harm caused by the fragmentation — reduced genetic diversity, increased inbreeding, eventual population collapse — falls on a species that has no market mechanism to express its interest in connectivity and no legal standing to seek damages from the government that built the road. The people who value mountain lion persistence — biologists, conservation advocates, the broader public that found P-22’s story compelling and contributed to the crossing’s private fundraising component — have diffuse interests that are not aggregated through market mechanisms into the investment signal required to build a land bridge over a freeway. The crossing required collective action: sustained advocacy over many years, the convening of public and private funding sources, the coordination of highway agencies and wildlife managers, and the political commitment of local governments and elected officials who represent constituents who value mountain lion persistence but who would not individually pay for the crossing.

This is the genuine public goods case for government infrastructure: when the benefits are diffuse and non-excludable, when the harm being corrected was created by prior government action, and when private market mechanisms cannot aggregate the diffuse value into investment, coordinated public action is the appropriate response. The wildlife crossing meets these criteria. The $18 million is justified by the ecological value it preserves. The value it preserves is real, scientifically documented, and consistent with any framework — libertarian or otherwise — that recognizes biodiversity as a good worth preserving.

What Makes This Different From Most Government Infrastructure

The wildlife crossing is distinguished from most government infrastructure by the specificity and demonstrability of the problem it solves, the proportionality of the investment to the problem scale, and the transparency of the design-to-outcome pathway. The $18 million will build a crossing whose use by mountain lions can be documented by camera traps, whose genetic connectivity function can be measured by DNA analysis of the crossing population over time, and whose success or failure will be visible in outcomes that can be independently verified. This is infrastructure whose accountability is built into its design: if mountain lions use it, the investment worked; if they do not, something went wrong that researchers will document and address. Most government infrastructure does not have this accountability clarity. The bridge project whose cost is triple the estimate and whose completion is seven years delayed has no equivalent accountability mechanism. The wildlife crossing does. It is the rare government project whose libertarian critique requires careful consideration of whether the market failure is genuine, the public good is real, and the accountability mechanism is adequate. In this case, all three are yes. According to the National Park Service, which has been monitoring the Santa Monica Mountains mountain lion population for 20 years, the genetic data supporting the crossing investment is comprehensive and the ecological case is well-established. The government built the road that created the problem. The government and private philanthropists are building the crossing that addresses it. The libertarian lesson is not that the crossing was wrong. It is that the road should have been built with wildlife connectivity in mind, and that government infrastructure that creates ecological harm creates obligations to correct it that the private market cannot fulfill on its own.

The Surf Connection: Wildlife and Ocean Access

The mountain lion and the surfer share a relationship with California’s public land and coastal access infrastructure that reveals the conditions under which government action is and is not justified. The surfer needs access to beaches that the public trust doctrine and the Coastal Act protect from privatization — a genuine public goods function. The surfer needs clean water at those beaches — a function that government has failed to adequately provide. The surfer needs road infrastructure to reach the beaches — infrastructure that imposes ecological costs, including wildlife habitat fragmentation, that government is obligated to address. The mountain lion needs connectivity that the wildlife crossing provides. These are connected: the network of public land, coastal access law, clean water regulation, transportation infrastructure, and wildlife habitat protection that enables both the mountain lion and the surfer to use Southern California’s shared landscape is a system whose components require collective management because the alternatives — private provision, market mechanisms, community governance — work for some components and fail for others. The intellectual task for a libertarian analysis of this system is identifying which components fail the market test and require collective provision, which succeed at community governance, and which have been captured by interests that use government action to serve private rather than public ends. The wildlife crossing succeeds the first test. The surf parking lot fails the second. The Coastal Commission is the third. The nuanced engagement with these distinctions is where the libertarian analysis of California coastal governance finds its most productive work.

For more on public goods, market failures, and the infrastructure worth building, visit Private Eye.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/