Hey everyone. First post here!
It’s easy enough to argue for the privatization of the DMV from an efficiency angle, but that’s not where my question lies. Is it feasible to have private firms issuing government documents such as licenses, license plates, registrations, etc.? If I got a driver’s license from a private DMV firm, would the firm then have to forward the necessary information to the police department?
Or perhaps, are private DMV’s only possible in a world without government?
There would be private issuers of licenses and such, as a world without government means there would be no DMV. And with a government, there will be no competitors. Ever. It’s a monopoly.
where govt did not build, tax and service roads i expect that yes, private roads without a govt dmv could exist and proboly flourish.
That is a concession, not a privatization. If the only demand for a service comes from the government, that service should be abolished, not contracted out to a private agency.
Why do we need licenses in the first place?
There are two ideas of “privatization” floating around.
First, the bad one. If the government goes to an individual and pays him to do something, that is called “public”. If that same individual registers a corporation and the government pays him through proxy of that fiction, it is called “private”. Hardly a worthy distinction.
Second, if an individual runs an enterprise with no government custom, it is very qualitatively different from all above. That is what I would call “private” and “feasible” IMO.
Presumably your insurance company would like to know that you know how to drive.
In an ancap society, there would probably be licenses, brands, standards and regulations all over the place, way many more than we have nowadays. The key difference is that their granting and enforcing wouldn’t be centralized and monopolized.