Oh, I actually thought you were Danno there.
I don’t know about you, but I live in a government-run region in which the government is making decisions of such folly that one can envision it becoming an intelligent anarchy in the foreseeable future. I would expect, in such a theoretical situation, that the road in front of my house would be bought by a company who intended to maintain and profit from its continued use as a road.
Then again, just because the business owning the road has been well-run and reasonable in the past is no guarantee that it will continue to be so in the future - even someone buying property in such an anarchic area would need to be wary of possible changes in performance and pricing.
Under current legal systems, easements can be written into deeds - but I don’t know if maintainence fees are often included in such easements - in the one case I am familiar with, they were not, leading to some unhappy disputes over usage. I do know that, in that case, road conditions became such an issue that the non-owner simply paid for maintainence, rather than fight a lawsuit he was not assured of winning, to get road quality up to the standards he (rather than the owner) wanted.
Contractual easements, between the road owner and the property owners adjacent to the road is one option, I suppose - though, living on a fairly major thoroughfare, I can see conflict between those with easements and those who simply pay toll on the roads for transport through the area. With new purchase contracts, or new road contracts, it’d be clearer and easier to construct contracts handling such - and, if the contract was unappealing, the home/property buyer could simply walk away from the deal, looking for a better deal elsewhere. But if the road adjacent to my house was transferred from governmental control to private control, I’d have very little control over who bought it, who they sold it to, or how they managed it.
With government, my control over such things is, admittedly, minimal - but there is some small degree of control. How would that control work in a system other than government? Only when I can (even theoretically) see this, can I intelligently evaluate the cost/benefit ratio of going from governmental control of ‘public use’ roads to market control of privately-owned roads with whom competition is not practicable.
Danno, who still has some violence for the expired equine, after all.
He can apply the new policy after the contract expires.
Not necessarily so, but there are situations where it has become that, yes.
Personally, I’d have loved to have owned a stake in K-Mart, when they were campaigning to have a major street blocked so that they could place a store at what had been a major cross-traffic intersection - I had insufficient resources to buy an important stake at that time, and have had to live with the skewing of traffic patterns ever since.
There are a number of corporations (largely health-related conglomerates) who are cooperating to build a major medical ‘mall’ about a half-mile from my house - I’d like a bit of say in what they’re doing, too. With my resources, I have more say with the Metro Council and City Board that are adjudicating that - but that’s insufficient also, unless I can get my neighbors to agree with me and bring more political force to bear. (Currently, the folks who lived in a nice quiet neighborhood and did not consider the offer to buy their land sufficient watched their neighbors sell - so they live in a parking lot now, and the value of their property has plummeted. The public promises made at the time by the corporations are not, apparently, contractual. Their mistake, perhaps - and entirely within the ‘rights of property ownership’ I agree with - but the big fish still get to eat the little fish in a market economy.)
Sadly, my resources are outstripped by my desires. How odd, in an economic forum.
That’s not at all close to anything I ever said - I just asked what the purely economical solution might be.
Danno, who knows that there are shades of gray in all philosophical decisions - just wishin’ for more contrast in this one.
Same as your control over any other product your purchase for in a market. The producer gives you what you want to have.
If you want to remain in collective control of all production of roads, then you are a communist.
Why do you assume it would be transfered from a government monopoly into a private monopoly?
You are in effect saying that the only solution to past government monopolies is more government monopolies while admitting that government monopolies are the problem. How’s that work???
Fine. So we’re not talking about wholly private roads after all ?
Danno, can you at least agree that private enterprise should have the right to buy land that is unincorporated and develop it as a city exempt of property taxes? This does not mean that you have to give up control of your current town, just that you have to give up control of the rest of the country’s land.
What contract ? Anyway, let’s imagine that the contract expires, the road owner comes up with a new contract and half the homeowners don’t agree with the new terms. Now what ?
Fine. I do agree that if there’s no competition things are not going to work. Also, if there’s no competition there’s no market to speak of.
One of the reasons why this conversation is a bit circular is that I never made clear my definition of government. If a HOA ‘runs’ a private city or gated community and the way they run it violates individual rights, then as far as I’m concerned, the HOA is a government in essence, if not in name.
It’s an important issue because it seems that whoever owns the streets and sidewalks in a city has the ‘right’ to decide how people can move.
I don’t know =]
I doubt those were libertarian societies. As a matter of fact, they were slave-holding societies, if I’m not mistaken.
If we are talking about sidewalks in a city, I don’t think that ‘traffic rules’ matter at all ? Will the road owner tell people how to walk ?..
I’m afraid there’s no such city =[
Okay. But that’s only possible because supposedly you own the land in which the roads will be built - that is, you have a territorial monopoly which supposedly(again) gives you the right to landlock all city residents unless they comply with your rules. Now, if those two conditions are met, then we’re not dealing with libertarianism, free markets and anarchy. We are dealing with monarchy.
Yes, that doesn’t make much sense. So my ‘solution’ is to not hand control of the roads to one individual, but to, somehow, own them jointly.
When you rent property normally you write up a lease that defines the terms of your use of the property and of eviction and so on. So long as you respect those, the landlord has to own up to his end of the contract.
Now suppose a landlord went crazy and decided to evict half of his tenants. If this a building we’re talking about he has to let them take out their property, meaning furniture and everything, before he can do anything with the available space. If this is a city, he has another problem, and that is that people’s property, buildings, is not movable. So although his former tenants are no longer allowed in the city, they still own property there that is, admittedly, no longer useful to them. They will have to sell the buildings to the city’s other tenants.
If we assume economic rationality on the landlord’s part, that means that evicting half of his tenants is a good demanded by the market. This means that the value of the buildings of the evicted tenants goes up because of their eviction, and they make more money selling the buildings now than they would have had they not been evicted as a group. Everybody wins.
That’s not what I’m talking about.
That’s even more nonsensical. You just keep on assuming that a city will be the private property of one individual - spare me the monarchical nonsense will you ?
What ? Anyway, it’s irrelevant. We’re talking about people who own their houses, not tenants.
Oh no, private property.
Really ? How do monarchs acquire this private property ? By hard work and homesteading no ?
If you insist on calling them so, then I guess in a libertarian society these “monarchs” would, yes.
The thing is, Stranger never answered the question and simply introduced a false analogy.
And the idea that a city can be the private property of just one person who can do whatever he pleases with it is nonsense.
No, we are. Easements are private arrangements. They’re not full-blown property rights, just rights to access.
-Jon
What is “monarchical” about this? It is certainly possible and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
-Jon
Not at all so. I’m a fan of ‘Coast’ bath soap. It went out of production early this year, and cannot be had for any price. The few honest scalpers ran out of stock - the dishonest scalpers send similar (but different) product when you order. The producer chose to quit producing that product, and I cannot get what I actually want.
In many cases in the free market, the consumer gets the best they can find - not exactly what they want.
Different from other cases in the free market, the folks who supply the road with access to my house have no competitors - I cannot reasonably expect two competing providers to be available at the end of my driveway. In a case of government control, I can at least try to get the folks in charge out of that job, by getting someone else elected. Absent an important block of stock (paid for by an important segment of my resources), I cannot do the same with the company supplying road at the end of my driveway. In most products, if a producer does not supply what I want, I can shop elsewhere. In the case of urban roads, I cannot.
Under government control, I have some minimal recourse in case of mismanagement. In the case of limited market (in which there is only one possible provider of the service), I don’t even have that slim recourse. Why, exactly, is that better than the case in which I have some limited recourse?
If you’re not a Shiite, then you’re an infidel, and must die - being Sunni is no excuse. (Apologies to any Islamics here who dislike my simplification for purposes of illustration - I meant no offense.)
What I want is a functional alternative to collective control of urban roads. What I get is name-calling. I may as well be discussing issues with liberals. The worst liberal I know personally, would never confuse the proprietor of a capitalist business with a communist.
Danno, back to being disgusted
It is, by virtue of being the only possible road at the end of my driveway, necessarily a monopoly. Not a monopoly of merit, not a monopoly of force - a monopoly by virtue of there being only room for one.
If it is transferred from government control to private ownership, what other sort of private enterprise could it be transferred to?
The existing government monopolies (in the USA, at least) are poorly designed. This is not surprising - they had little previous art to copy, and were making it up as they went along, with minimal real-world data available.
For an astounding majority of goods and services, a free market would be a decided improvement.
For some few instances, such as private roads in urban settings, a free market is physically impossible - and I’d like to know how a free market society would handle this safely without government-like organizaitons.
Danno, wondering how many times I must repeat this stuff…