My reply is more messy (chaotic ? anarchical ?) than usual - so I apologize in advance.
No, I agree that there’s no obvious and perfect way to do that.
But the market doesn’t come into play in this. My assertion is always true. IF people are not angels THEN government is a worse ‘solution’ than no-government – that’s all.
My personal position is that the problem of roads within a city is not being framed correctly. The issue is not how free enterprise can provide roads - the issue is how land ownership gets assigned.
No wonder about that since government, by design, is free to dictate what the law is.
I missed that part. As far as I know there never was a libertarian government. Maybe there were stable tyrannies, but I’m not very interested in them…
The thing is, it never happened in practice, and theory says it can never happen, so, frankly, it seems to me that the rational position is, after all, anarchy…
I’m not sure that’s the proper name. A bunch of people owning a road are just that, people owning a road. Joint ownership of roads doesn’t give anybody the ‘right’ to political control. Traffic laws are politically irrelevant and would be handled by private providers of security/insurance companies, anyway.
In a free city people can do whatever they please in their homes and businesses. And I expect that in a city where people have libertarian leanings, they would find the idea of using the roads to exclude redheads, or gays, or commies, to be a ridiculous idea.
And I repeat, I don’t see how an association whose purpose is to maintain sidewalks can be used as a tool for tyranny.
Do you trust the entity that owns the food you eat to be reasonably benevolent? What about the software, the phones, the fuel, the hospitals you trust? Are they benevolent?
In other words, do you know and understand anything about the science of economics?
Some small bit, though I’m far from being an expert. The entities that own the food, software, phones, etc. can, and do, all compete for my business, out of their own clear self-interest.
The reason that roads in urban areas are a different case is that there is a limited space for those roads to exist in. Acme Roads, a half-mile away, being run efficiently and pricing themselves competitively does me, the consumer, no good - if the road facing my house is run by Zenith Streets, who charge above-average prices while providing the absolute minimum of road maintainence.
If there is a practicable means for Acme Roads to compete for my business with Zenith Streets, then this conversation is, indeed, moot - but I would greatly appreciate an explanation of what that means would be.
Whatever one wishes to call it. It’s pretty ineffective now in the US due to legislation obstructing it, but in an unhampered market it’d be an effective check on firms that become inefficient.
I can’t complain - my replies have been later, and less concise, than I’d have liked. You’ve nothing to apologize for that I can see.
In nearly every case of economics, that is demonstrable - either by real-world events, or by clear theoretical examples of how something would or could work - and we agree. In the case of goods and services that cannot be regulated by competition (an admittedly rare case), I am not convinced of the truth of your assertion. I’ve seen enough non-government owner associations to be more nervous about trusting my fate to them than I am about my present government - which scares me spitless.
I don’t quite see how that’s the central issue in this, but for argument’s sake, I’ll accept that. How do you think we could assign the ownership of existing urban roads in such a way as to prevent them from becoming autocratic, and ensuring that they would remain responsive to reasonable wishes of their customers?
Someone pointed to where, on Wikipedia, it was asserted that pre-conquest Ireland (and pre-Roman Europe) were ‘anarchistic’ - the Kings weren’t really rulers, and the warlords couldn’t declare war. That wasn’t quite accurate, but it was close - government was remarkably unintrusive for its time, and it was stable for thousands of years. I doubt that such a society could be recreated today, but we may well have much to learn from that example.
The USA was widely intended to be libertarian in principle - but that intent was not universal, and has largely failed because of some flaws in that design - flaws that I believe could be corrected, if starting over were an available option.
Which, by theory, will work just fine - except in those areas, like urban roads, where the theory doesn’t seem to work. Unless, of course, we can devise a method by which anarchy can be made to work for those situations, which possibility I remain hopeful about.
Joint ownership still requires some control, some decision-making process - and even if it’s not governmental, it will be prone to political problems. (If there’s a means for a group to come to a decision other than political means, I’d be interested in hearing of it.)
Personally, I’d expect that a private road provider would decide upon the traffic rules they preferred, and may provide their own enforcement, rather than hiring another company to provide it.
If you know of any city, anywhere, where the majority of residents have libertarian leanings, I’d be interested in hearing of that, too. But I fear that you are misspoken here - if I can, by force or fraud, bring people into my home and do whatever I like with them, it’s not freedom - there needs to be some limiting factor (theoretically, entities that provide personal security, and clear laws to delineate what is and is not permitted in this free city). Yet, the residents of that free city will need to be able to go from home to work to shopping, and that transit must be paid for, and only if it can be freely competed for will I trust the free market to provide those transit options.
I’m sorry - I’d thought that this had been made clear. Let me try to give a non-absurd example.
I was high bidder when they sold the sidewalks and roads in your neighborhood, and now I’ve decided that I want to provide the very best roads and sidewalks in history - no pothole lasting longer than 2 business days, all debris and snow cleared daily, cleaning done every week, the very finest construction methods and materials known. Unfortunately, this is not inexpensive, so I’ll need to charge $25,000US equivalent, in gold, silver, or platinum per year per household for this service, with a 2-car per household limit (additional cars will need additional fees).
Or mayhaps I can double that fee - after all, the roads and sidewalks are my property, and I have the right to do so.
Welcome to the tyranny of the marketplace where there is no actual space for competition.
In a free market, it’d be easy to compete with me and watch me go out of business as the customers flock to my competitors. In the case of the road/sidewalk that your property fronts upon, how can someone else compete? Airlift? I dunno about you, but there’s no room for a helicopter pad on my property, unless I give up my garage - and even then, we’d need a shift of technology.
If an individual can do it, so can a corporation, owner’s association, or any other entity who controls that road and sidewalk.
How will anarchy prevent this?
My local government, as little as I like it, is set up to prevent it - any controlling group that became that excessive in their demands would find themselves out of office fairly quickly. Far from an ideal situation, but it does, demonstrably, work - nobody is going broke or getting rich over road access to their home, though remarkably stupid construction/repair in business areas is causing some marginal businesses to go bankrupt. Residential areas, however, not representing Evil Capitalists, they cannot unduly interfere with, or they’d need to go out hunting for new jobs. The setup is flawed - situations arose that the designers did not anticipate, so it works poorly - but it works. Improving the constitution/city charter to prevent such abuses could be done fairly easily, along libertarian lines. More unforseen situations or ursupations may arise from that - but nobody would find themselves restricted to their own property because they could not pay the tolls to go elsewhere.
Apparently ‘corporate control’ is just another word for tyranny…err, two words.
You also assume that the dispassionate, disinterested homeowner would care enough to own a stake in the company that dictates when and where they can drive unlike a (presumably) democratic system of collective road ownership where everyone in a geographic area gets to determine what is ‘fair’ no matter how small a stake they have in the road system.
Pure economics will never solve this problem, the only ‘fair’ way is through violence.
Nonsense. Let’s say the ‘owner’ changed his policies from ‘gay-friendly’ to ‘gay-hating’ - after all it’s his property and he can do whatever he wishes.