There will be no street cleaners in a free society and therefore anarchy is doomed!
Government is a noun not an adjective or adverb. Should we discuss the differences between the way I define a TV and you define a TV?
I totally concede that non residential main roads that join cities can reasonably charge tolls and will work.
I totally concede that residential roads with a small number of residents can work.
What I have great difficulty with is how a private residential road with a large number of residents, where there is not a common landlord, can work - i.e. like in most large cities. Please tell me, were there ever private roads of this type in America? And if there were, how successful were they?
http://www.privateroads.co.uk/linksFAQ.html
Our largest member has more than 400 houses
i assume that two such streets one after the other would mean 800 houses, etc etc.
The roads Johnathan mentioned do not fulfill my criteria - i.e. >500 residents.
Ok, not my finest argument. But It was not meant to be a proof - simply supporting evidence.
Thanks for the link. I shall have a good read of the PRS site before commenting further.
Why would there be large cities? Perhaps large cities are only possible because of public roads. Which then leads one to ask, are large cities even desirable? Would they be desirable with private roads?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/34508.html
Look, I really don’t care about people’s hangups with individual liberty, sovereignty, free markets and roads. I just answer a lot of these threads, so I am somewhat prepared for the debate. The state is a criminal myth. It is institutionalized violence. It abrogates free will. I feel fairly confident that free people, will figure out the roads without city planners, and bureaucrats.
You know, when I was a minarchist, I worried about how things would work in a free market too. But when I weighed the moral argument, the bright truth about state illegitimacy and violence, I couldn’t let minor hangups about who will provide clean water, or who will arrest criminals continue to chain me to the state as the best solution. If bureacrats and scoundrels can provide these services now, why can’t honest and intelligent private citizens?
Some towns in Castilla La-Mancha have populations of 20,000+. My town has a population of 3,000+. Not all these are farmers. But, for example, the private highway which connects Socuellamos with El Provencio (20,000+ and 3,000+, respectively) is an example of an agricultural highway which is completely private and has a lot of traffic.
It’s not as if you can just build anything anywhere you want. We have state planning of land use called “zoning”. Every construction is the whim of local bureaucrats.
I was talking about roads which have residents live along the road, like in a city. I just looked at google maps of the road you are talking about. It looks like a road bounded on each side by fields. It is not a residential road.
Wikipedia states “the same article notes that the government plays an active roll in administering these roads”. My claim is that certain types of private road will not evolve in a free market. So if these roads appear with the government playing an “active role”, then it is not a counterexample.
Correct. Such roads would only appear with government, meaning they are uneconomic and would not otherwise exist.
A bit of obscure common law of property is that when the state abandons a road, it reverts to the adjoining landowners. Like Senor Catalan pointed out, the landowner’s incentives would be to grant an easement for their portion of the road for “public” use. Roads are actually the smallest hurdle in transitioning to a free society but people seem to have a huge mental block about them. Probably because they’re so used to the centrally planned grids in the US that are laid out with no regard for geography or culture.
Re: Mises and Hazlitt, both men were writing at a time when the government was far less overreaching, and the concepts of Nation and State were still rather intertwined. That undoubtedly influenced their perspective. If you’ve got a “night watchman” sort of government, then there’s just not much incentive to think about libertarian politics.
oh my god… STREET SWEEPERS! I have wasted my life. Can I somehow acquire these street sweepers if I toil in the communist salt mines? Because that would be worth it.
China where private companies are allowed to build private freeways. Btw, your logic is profoundly retarded.
If you are enslaved, then you are not free. Thus, according to your logic, since your freedom does not exist, it follows that you must be enslaved.
After being accused of not doing my research, I decided to get in contact with “Private Roads Services” (privateroads.co.uk). I had a few emails back and forth and can now tell you some of the things they said.
The guy spoke of something he coined a “dissident ratio” which was the fraction of residents who refused to take part in a private road scheme. He said the success or failure of a plan to opt out of government control of a road was very sensitive to this ratio:
"up to about 10% seems tolerable; but this is a very sensitive number in the context of private roads and estates, since the majority will be unwilling to devote resources (their own time and money) to managing the road in order to benefit the minority. Result: individuals opt out and join the minority, the number of dissidents quickly rises, and the organisation collapses. "
“The private roads which we have in England and Wales are either cul-de-sacs or through-roads which the public don’t really need to use, because there is a nearby adopted road which gets them where they want to go. Large numbers of these are not subject to public rights of way (at any rate for motor vehicles - see NERC). I’ve never heard of residents opening the road to the public but charging a toll, though many take steps to prevent public encroachment (notices, gates and other barriers).”
He also said that the largest number of residents he knew of in a private road in the UK was 420.
I had not been considering cul-de-sac’s and roads with very limited through-traffic before before in my discussions. So I’m going to slightly modify my challenge to this as follows:
I challenge anyone here to find a single private road on planet earth which meets the following criteria: 500 or more residents - A significant amount of traffic which is not simply the residents/friends driving to their homes - the residents must not all share a common landlord.
Tough shit, now isn’t it? People will have to get used to finding ways of providing roads for themselves or do without. They have no right to force anyone to provide it for them and if they are too stupid to contribute to its financing and prefer going without, well too bad.
What is the point of a challenge where you exclude all logical solutions right at the begginning?
Well it appears to be debatable whether or not a road of this type is logical or not. I suggest that it is not. Other people here suggest that it is. If there were some examples somewhere in the world then that would be evidence against my position. If there are none then that supports my position.
My question to you regarding your challenge is: why? Why should we try to find that? And then–what’s it matter if we can’t?
Hey, numbnuts! What this tells you is that people would rather use the “free” roads – that its, roads paid for by other people – than pay for their own seperate roads. Who the hell wouldn’t? Numbnuts, if you could either live in a home that you had to pay for, or a home that was free to you and that other people paid for, which would you chose? The reason why your challange is idiotic, and why you are retarded in the clinical sense, is because your asking why the free market doesn’t work in a non-free market. Numbnuts, you might as well ask why we can’t make apple juice with oranges.