So, I tried out a new argument on a non-anarchist with a measure of success. I thought this up some time back and was waiting for an opportunity to deploy it. It worked.
So, I explained how public roads lead to congestion because there is no incentive for the Roads Dept. to impose price-discipline on drivers (the department is tax-funded) and, therefore, drivers have no incentive not to clog the roads. In Portland, OR, every Friday afternoon during the summer, the retirees hit the roads headed for the beach at the same time everyone who works a job is trying to commute home from work. Now, retirees have every bit as much right to use the public roads as anybody else but I’m willing to bet that, on those Friday afternoons, most commuters would be willing to outbid most retirees if road use was a market commodity.
Most people are with me up to this point but then they still don’t see that as a sufficient reason to go and muss things up with extreme measures like across-the-board privatization of roads. So, this time, I pointed out how road socialism is actually in the interests of oil barons, like Mr. Rockefeller or the Saudi royal family, since those millions of hours that Americans waste idling on the road every day are just change in their pockets. This set off a lightbulb in the head of the person I was talking to and she said, “Oh, wow, I never really thought of it like that. I guess people can be pretty devious.”
I then proceeded to point out the implicit contradiction in the position held by most environmentalists. They are against the burning of oil because they feel it harms the planet yet they play right into the hands of the very oil barons they imagine they oppose as members of Greenpeace or The Audubon Society by supporting government (socialist) roads. This, I think, is a good example of where you can use an efficiency-based argument (utilitarian) to advantage. Given their own ends, environmentalists should be opposed to road socialism.
Clayton -