What this tells us 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? 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 is because your asking why the free market doesn’t work in a non-free market. You might as well ask why we can’t make apple juice with oranges.
A) Desirable* things that can easily be made by man tend to exist - chocolate cake, umbrellas and shoes for example.
B) Desirable* things that can not be easily made by man tend not to exist - everlasting batteries and teleportation machines for example.
C) Undesirable* things tend not to exist regardless of whether they are easily made by man or not - One legged stools, potato jewelry and polka-dot-colored expressways to the moon for example.
Corporations are run by small groups of people or even a single person. If a car making company decides to make more red cars than blue ones, the bosses do not have to seek agreement amongst the workers for that to go ahead.
My problem with private roads is all about the necessity of getting so much cooperation from so many independent parties.
Please stop putting “lol” at the end of all your arguments. Its damn rude and makes you seem about 12 years old.
I think what your missing here about desireability is how that desireability changes when government moves their hand out of an industry. Some services are barred from existence as the government monopolizes itself into an industry. Services that, otherwise WOULD BE desireable, are not found in quantity due to that government monopoly. As long as government holds a monopoly and people are forced to subsidize that monopoly, roads, for everyone, people are going to naturally choose the most economic route, public roads.
On the other side, had government not existed in roads people would choose a different economic route. Going along with an above posters analogy with homes. If we had socialized housing, very few people would front the expense for their own private home. They could not justify paying taxes for everyone’s home including their own, and then purchase another house on top of that. This is why private education is so expensive for people.
The story changes though when consumers are not forced to purchase the government good but are allowed to purchase their own. There is a reason why the government DOES NOT offer tax incitives for going private on many commodities. This is because it would destroy the government market, as government is incapable of keeping up with the free market competitors. Point in case, why can’t people who home school or private school their kids get tax credits? Perhaps it’s because people would abandond the shitty public school…
Government cannot handle competition, hence the forced monopolization. FYI, every city or state I lived in had a DOT which operated in an economic loss. Do you think a private industry would do that?
I get your point, but check what your defending. Your basically arguign that without governmental oversight business would stop tomorrow as no one would build new roads, or that the contracts to build them would be too entangling. I have a hard time beleiving with as innovative as the market is roads would stop being maintained, improved apon, or expanded should government stopped participating in their creation.
In short, you state that free-enterprise is ill-equiped to handle such problems but that government is equiped and can handle them with effeciency. It’s odd because all innovation that we enjoy came from the free-market originally, and almost every governmental program I know of operates in failure. So it seems backwards to me to defend a broken system against a succesfull system in regarding complex objects.
This is a good point. To add to it, what happens when you stop paying your water bill, electric bill, internet bill, phone bill? Like any other utilty you get cut off. If you think thats unfair then you beleive in socialism. Thats really all there is to it.
I disagree - what I wrote tells us more information than your synopsis.
free/non-free is a matter of degree. It seems to be free enough so that tens of thousands of private roads (of certain restricted types) have sprung up around the world.
The internet was created in this manner, yes, but it languished for decades under the government. Only when a private mechanism was added did the network we know today emerge.
It’s a great example. It shows how the free market lets technology explode when the governmetn lets go. Also you don’t know your full history. Darpa was built on earlier models of ethernet. SOmething that was originally created by free-market enterprises but scrapped because the use was not yetrealized. Xerox is one of these firms.
Similarly to my immediately preceding reply: if it was originally created by the free market and then discarded as not profitable, the government ends up being the critical factor, due to its tax-based (i.e., not profit-centric) budgeting.
It doesn’t really matter though since the internet as we know it today was built on a collaborative effort of free enterprise. The origins of it only give merit to our argument that the private industry can take a previous governmentally controlled object and create it into something far better.
Further more the capitalism can take all sorts of things regardless of how they are conveived and turn them into profitable endeavors.
So the internet is still a good example as a comparisson when speculating what would happen if Roads were pushed off into the private industry.