I agree, but it’s not enough to merely explain that private businesses could take over existing infrastructure of any kind. We have to be able to describe how infrastructure of such complexity could originate on a free market. For roads, I think a lot of pertinent argumentation has already been given—the OP is just selectively ignoring points made.
I get your point Justin. I don’t see why the origins of a product is important and for that matter it seems like to me 99% or more of the luxuries we take were created on the free market. Practically everything the government takes credit for making technologically was actually created by private firms then handed over to the government via some contract. Arpanet is no exception. For example, the US Government does not build jets and airplanes, it contracts to Boeing. The government paid big bucks for other folk to develop Arpanet.
My response your other point would be:
Site an example of where the free market has ever failed.
I am sorry but there are not enough hours in the day for me to respond to every single point in every post - so forgive me I don’t do that now.
But I would like to discuss something that has come up again and again. It seems as though many of the work-arounds of the problems I brought up right from the start are to do with contracts. Things along the lines of “well if the market was free right from the beginning then the contracts could be in place in a private road such that it was a condition of moving in that potential residents sign up to the road payment policy”. Presumably these policies that people will voluntarily sign up to, will include wording like “we agree to abide by the rules, and pay whatever bills arise from, the policy set up by the landlord/committee/mall owner/whatever”. Now people here often complain about how terrible it is that the government use threats of physical force against anyone that doesn’t abide by the rules. But what about if I moved in to a new house and signed up to the voluntary private road maintenance scheme… but then years later the landlord/committee went sour - perhaps the landlord was going a little senile or the committee was taken over by some new guy who was rather stupid. Say I decided I was unhappy about the quality of maintenance that went on and I decided to protest by not paying my portion of the maintenance bill. What happens then?.. it seems to me that we are back to square one. The landlord/private road committee is now acting like a small scale government. They can employ the fact that they have a contract, to (indirectly via the courts) use physical violence to get their bills paid.
Writing this has just reminded me of a situation my mother once found herself in. She purchased a new flat in a block and (voluntarily) signed a maintenance contract for the upkeep of the exterior of the building. It turned out that the freeholders were crooked as hell and would use any tiny excuse to “repair” or repaint the outside while paying overblown fees to their “friends” the builders. The (private) freeholders seemed to be displaying all the characteristics of the governments you all so hate. Sure, she could (and eventually did) move out. But it was a miserable period in her life.
Are you seriously this incapable of applying a principle to a situation? If the landlord doesn’t abide by the contract, you have the right to force him to do so or to seek retribution. And what if the landlord has bigger guns? Well, how hell does it default that we need the state, that, by definition, is a violator of rights?
A) She can ultimately back out of that contract. It’s not lifetime binding. Unlike Government.
B) She had the free option to look over the contract before she commited. Unlike Government
We arn’t saying there aren’t bad people out there.
I’ll sit here quitely until you reply to this. Or are you afraid of being wrong, because your entire argument is based on the fallacy that “free/non-free is a matter of degree”?
A) - well not really - she could only “back out” of the contract by selling up and moving out. This would cause huge disruption, not to mention all the costs of selling/buying/moving. Hardly a solution.
B) - the contract won’t reveal whether the freeholders/managing agents are decent people.
With a bad government, you can get rid of them at the ballot box. This is not a perfect solution by any means, but at least its a possibility.
I’m not sure I understand. Overthrowing a bad government via the ballot box is more of a possibility than moving home?
Sorry you’ve had to “sit there quietly” for so long, but we are probably in different time zones and I have a job.
Imagine that you had a world of 10 billion people and it was a perfect anarchist system with perfect free trade everywhere. Then imagine another world identical in all respects, except there was a big bully there who insisted that one particular person X was not allow to purchase anything from another particular person Y - all other 9,999,999,998 people could trade as they wish. Presumably you would say this this second world simply “did not have free trade”, whereas I would say “it has almost complete free trade”. Is my description of the situation so foolish?
Presumably if you owned a car and the wing mirror got knocked off, you would cease to call the remainder a car.
I’m saying that under both systems we seem to potentially end up with both bad outcomes and unsatisfactory “escape routes”.
The government based bad outcome: we have a bad government serving us badly and using threat of force to make us pay for the services.
The free market based bad outcome: We have bad freeholders serving us badly and using threat of force to make us pay.
The government based unsatisfactory “escape route”: We attempt to change the government through the ballot box.
The free market based unsatisfactory “escape route”: We sell our home and move elsewhere incurring substantial costs.
Its just not so clear to me that the free market is doing so much better than the government in this regard.
It’s good that you admit to being a crank that calls the existing system “free market”. This trolling is getting out of hand.
I won’t call you a troll like Caley, but we are nowhere near a free market. If you want examples of privately-owned highways, look at China.
I don’t see how the situation that my mother got herself stuck with would have been prevented in a more free market. So describing her contract with the freeholder as a free market trade is I think reasonable for the purposes of this debate.
Please tell me more about these private highways in China. How did you come to hear about them?
Do you know how to learn mickanomics?
We are having a debate on a public forum about characteristics of roads. Daniel has just said “…look at China”. Presumably he said this because he knows something about private roads in china. I just thought he might add another sentence or two for the benefit of both me and the followers of this thread. Perhaps a sentence like “there’s a great article about them at xxxx” or “they run very efficiently and the residents are happy with them” or “I lived there so I know how good they are”… something like that.
I asked: Do you know how to learn? I didn’t ask about the thread or what Daniel said, etc… I know the topic is street cleaners in a free market.
Well I do have a degree in physics and a PhD in neural networks and am a multi award winning artificial intelligence programmer, so I would like to suggest that I do know something about learning.
How do I know if you are being dishonest or not?
I am not lying. I will send you some things in a personal email that will convince you.