I’ve proposed a solution to this problem. Auction the road, split the proceeds to the victims based on the amount of money stolen. It’s just a rough idea, but Wombatron and I talked about this months ago. Seems a lot better than mutualist occupancy and use junk, where the drivers or nearby property owners get a road they may not have paid a nickel for.
Sorry, but I don’t understand that sentence.
Anyway, I think the government and its workers are rather like a huge company producing goods and services, with the government being the directors and the government workers being the employees. Note that the government employees work voluntarily for their wages - there is no coercion there. The coercion comes in the form of the income mechanism for the government company - i.e. taxes.
By the way they didn’t steal from me. I gave them my tax money voluntarily because I know that I get a lot in return for that money. They only “steal” from those who don’t wish to pay their taxes.
Presumably the only reason anyone would buy a road is so that they could charge for its use. Right? How would they do that? Would we have tolls every few hundred yards as we drove from one road to another in a big city?
That’s nuts. The government can’t produce anything. They can’t win wars, they can’t manage a budget, and they incarcerate their own constituents for victimless crimes like prostitution and personal drug use.
The “workers” in your scenario, don’t produce anything under government direction. They don’t get “paid” they are forced to pay the directors, or they will be incarcerated, and if they resist further they will face violence.
Government employees are paid with taxes confiscated from productive members of society. They aren’t actually earning a wage, since they were not hired by the people who pay taxes, and they can’t be fired by the people who pay taxes.
Keep believing that they are providing a return on your investment.
Sure, do you think roads fall out of the sky? Someone has to build them. Maintain them. That costs money.
Tolls make sense, because the drivers pay to use the road, and the people who dont use the road, don’t have to pay for it. Externalities solved!
The government doesn’t produce anything without taking taxes (by coercion thus stealing) to make what the government wants. That’s not a liberty market.
try not paying your taxes - it’s coercion. And no the government doesn’t sell anything and make a profit off of a people who voluntarily giving their money to the government. It’s not a business. A business works within a profit/loss scenario. The government is currently bankrupt but still goes on by coercive measures. People choose to pay taxes, but if they don’t then the government will come after such a person. Now I’ve heard of places in which people get away with not paying taxes, but the government in history has attempted at various times to come after these people. Some of them have actually been able to fight off the government and deterring the government from getting them, but these people had to use self-defense with weapons to stop the government from getting them.
good for you for cooperating with your government cause if you didn’t…
Is there one city on earth with a population > 50,000 where all the roads are privately owned? And if not, why not?
Is there even one road on earth, with more than 500 people living along it, that is privately owned (where the owner of the road is not also the landlord of all the tenants)? And how is the cost of lighting and, cleaning and maintenance paid for? Do the residents and people parking on it have to pay?
People with Austrian tendencies would privatize the streets and the problem would disappear.
Considering monarchical city-states as private landlords, a few have a population greater than 50,000, most notably the Emirates cities such as Dubai. In fact in Dubai it is real-estate corporations that own neighborhoods.
On modern highways tolls are paid when entering and exiting, not at every milestone. You could have a model also like London where you must pay to enter the central zone. Alternatively you could only make people pay to connect their doorway to the road, much as one pays for a subscription to a utility.
The same reason why the US government forced thousands of men to fight and die in Vietnam against their will. The same reason why the Soviets operated gulags. The same reason why blacks were slaves.
They have the power of the gun, and endless devotion. That devotion is what they count on when they do violent and criminal things.
http://www.autoroutes.fr/en/homepage.html
Roads, roads, roads. We always have to start with the roads. Not the Constitution. Not taxes. Not war. Not education or pensions. It’s the roads. No one can imagine private roads.
If they were austrians the government wouldn’t own the road in the first place.
If you just think about which places are presently the most littered, what do you come up with?
Just as I suspected - nobody has come up with a single example on planet earth of a private road that meets my criteria. The autoroutes of France fail because they do not have people living on them. They are motorways that join cities. What I was looking for was a road that people (>500) live on, where there is not a common landlord. The reason you can’t find a single example is because it is farcical to arrange such a thing. If it made sense to anyone to have such a thing then there would be examples somewhere.
(residential) roads are simply a particularly clear example of where privatization can not work. Mrs Thatcher spent her years privatizing everything she could think of. In all her years in power she never even discussed the idea of privatizing residential roads. Believe me, she’d have done it if she thought it was doable.
And yet nearly all roads in America were private roads at one time. Were those farcical times, occupied by farcical people?
Sure they can, and they do. Did you not read Jonathan’s post? I think he remarked you skipped it. Did you skip it, or are you ignoring it?
Another negative proof fallacy. Lousy argumentation on your part.
The most common type of private road is a residential road maintained by a homeowners association, housing co-op, or other group of individual homeowners (e.g. the private places of St. Louis, Missouri, Rossmoor, California, Celebration, Florida, Camp John Hay in Baguio, Borocay, the Ayala and Fort Bonifacio Development between Makati and Pasig, Laredo, Texas, and Ford’s Colony near Williamsburg, Virginia).
and
England and Wales are thought to have about 40,000 private roads. They are not the responsibility of the local authority, so have to be maintained by residents.
And there is a bit about Sweden in there. Now unsourced Wikipedia is far from authoritative, but I will certainly accept it over a certain logical fallacy. You could have done an iota of research.
I see how the original poster switched from an innocuous question to a forceful answer.