Being involved in collisions (regardless of experience or fault) places you in a different insurable class with other individuals who have also been involved in collisions. I don’t understand the details of how insurance companies handle this but the essence of the problem remains, as described by Dr. Hoppe, “Competition in the insurance market would lead to ever more-refined subgroupings of people into groups that are internally homogeneous.” [Emphasis mine]
Clayton -
Amin to that. But that sentence flies in the face of his idea that no business where the insured has any control over the outcome could ever conceivably be insured. If people can be group into homogenous group, those tending to cause more damages too can be grouped together, and will end up paying more. Even to someone not versed in insurance, these two proposition should seem at odds.
Why the implicit condescension (i.e. your use of “um”)? Or am I reading too much into this?
Anyways, I’d suggest that the claim that public thoroughfares have allegedly always existed in no way means that they must or necessarily will always exist in the future. Now with that said, I will go on the record and say that, in the absence of government, I think all land and other natural resources will end up being homesteaded (and therefore owned) by people. The distribution of that ownership is irrelevant to me. But it does mean that I think all of the New Mexico desert, for example, will be owned by someone. Hence I think it’s unlikely that there will be public thoroughfares.
If there’s unowned land, however, then anyone and everyone can cross it at their own risk. However, I’d consider all of that land to be a “public thoroughfare”, not just certain paths through it.
Just out of curiosity, what makes roads so “insanely expensive” to build (and presumably also to maintain)? I don’t have a whole lot of knowledge here, I’ll admit.
On the other hand, I don’t see how the expense of building/maintaining roads means they necessarily would not have speed limits of the kind I described. In fact, I’d say that regular highways and country roads would also have speed limits. City streets might even have them, but I’ll have to do some more thinking there.
Very interesting idea. However, I think you’re right about rails. And if the trains were supported by electricity, some (relatively) small amount of it could even go to the rails to keep them above freezing in the winter.
No, I didn’t mean to be condescending. My only point is that it has never been the case that everything is owned and I think it’s a pretty easy case to make that never will everything be owned (who will own the rights to sunlight incident to the Earth? or who will own the upper-atmosphere? or who will own satellite orbits? and so on?)
Actually, I think that if you think about privatizing government land, you inevitably run into this. In the Western US where I live, the vast majority of the land has been locked up as “public lands” (I think as much as 90% of Nevada is publicly "owned). If these lands were auctioned off to settle a US government default on its bonds, for example, some of the thoroughfares through those public lands would have to have easements granted since private citizens had been using those roads long before the lands were auctioned. Such easements would create unowned, public thoroughfares.
I’m not saying this will happen, I’m just giving one example of where it couldn’t help but happen. And there’s more. Consider if the government began privatizing all roads that it currently manages. Most roads could be sold as-is to for-profit toll road companies who would then recoup their money on the tolls from the road. But a great deal of roads out here in the West that are paved probably never should have been. We have forest roads that go off literally to nowhere and are paved… the only people who ever drive on them are Forest Service employees, hunters and naturists. No private entity could profitably maintain these roads, yet they are in use, so they cannot just be sold with the land. Hence, roads of this nature that fall into the “in use but cannot be profitably operated as a toll-road” would have to become public thoroughfares.
See above.
What’s the point of a speed limit? “Don’t go faster than this or else…” what? We’ll trespass you from our roads? Doesn’t that cause us to lose revenues? And the competition can just step in with a higher limit. Time is money - for-profit companies try not to force their customers to waste it. I don’t think most highways would have any speed limit in a privatized road system. Intra-city highways might, certainly city streets would (since the city could easily profitably traffic-patrol the streets).
Clayton -
Fair enough. I stand corrected.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to make the case that literally everything will be owned. Although you bring up some interesting questions. Forgive me if they’re rhetorical, but I’d like to try to answer them.
Who will own the rights to sunlight incident to the Earth? Whoever homesteads the area on which they fall.
Who will own the upper atmosphere? Whoever homesteads paths through it.
Who will own satellite orbits? Whoever homesteads them.
Does that make sense?
I guess the question I have here is to whom the easments would go. My understanding of easements is that they are granted to individuals or firms. However, there would be no such firm as “the people of Nevada” in the absence of government there. So I’m not sure how an easement can be granted to “everyone” like that.
I agree with you that a lot of paved roads out West probably should’ve never been paved. In the absence of “universal easements”, however, I’m not sure what would happen to them. Maybe they’d form boundaries between tracts of land. Or maybe they’d become recreational thoroughfares in parklands. Some of them would inevitably be closed to the public, however. The new landowners don’t want trespassers, etc.
Also, I don’t see why a road would have to be operated as a toll-road at all. I can see plenty of roads being subsidized by other ventures.
Well, I guess I shouldn’t have used “speed limit” there. I meant “speed rating”, like I wrote in my initial post in this thread:
I still just generally object to this line of thinking as symptomatic of our immersion in a society where speed-limits have always been around. If the insurance company wants to know how fast you’ve been driving, why wouldn’t they install a monitoring device right in the car?? The road owner surely wouldn’t want to pay people to run around with radar guns… it just cuts into profits.
Think about it this way. Internet service providers sell bandwidth. They want you to be able to have as much bandwidth as possible for the price, so you will come to them over their competitors. This leads to a general upward pressure on bandwidth capacity. This is the trend everywhere in competitive markets… the most for your money. For-profit road operators would be selling accommodation for transportation. They would want their customers to be able to get from point A to point B as fast as possible. This would lead to competitive improvement of road surfaces and road technology to enable cars to be operated as close to their safe speed capacity as possible. The idea of speed limits is inherently statist.
Clayton -
Please don’t mistake me as an advocate for speed limits (or speed ratings) in this thread. I was merely speculating how they could still come about in a free-market society. Whether they would or should come about is a different matter, as far as I can tell.
Monitoring devices installed in cars by insurance companies is indeed one of the possibilities I mentioned:
However, while maximizing throughput/volume is always a good strategy in the abstract, it runs into barriers in reality. For example, the faster one travels, the greater the likelihood is that a collision (should one happen) will cause more damage. People, generally speaking, don’t seem to want to be involved in collisions, especially severe ones. So they’ll tend not to travel on roads that they perceive have a sufficiently (again, subjective to them) high likelihood of sufficiently (ibid.) severe collisions. One of the things that seems to affect that perception upwards is when people are travelling at highly disparate speeds on the same road.
Of course, I understand that competitive markets trend towards greater efficiency. However, getting from point A to point B as fast as possible still means actually getting there at all, if not also getting there unharmed. After all, how efficient is a road where you can travel at 200 miles per hour, but there’s a 50% chance of a collision every 5 miles, and 90% of collisions are fatal?
My point is that there isn’t one catch-all standard for efficiency. In the case of cars and roads, for example, there seem to be trade-offs between greater speed and greater safety. While “speed” can be defined objectively, however, it seems more difficult to pin down “safety” that way.
One can never know what the market will dictate unless it is allowed to exist. That being said, I suspect that speed limits would become obsolete if we ever had private roads, or at least significantly higher than they are today. Where I live, the City Council determines the speed limit not by judging the safety of the road but by conducting an annual census whereby the “new” speed limit is the 85th percentile of the speeds surveyed. This would seem to indicate that the true purpose of the speed limit is not to ensure safety but simply to give tickets to 15% of the population.
Some libertarians argue that in a propertarian society, private institutions would perform the same tasks that the state does currently. However, that merely concedes the argument to socialists that there is no contradiction in socialist calculation. Given the experiences that have occured without road central planning (see those towns in England and Holland where they eliminated traffic lights), I believe that private roads would not have speed limits or traffic lights or any idiotic prohibitions against texting or being slightly intoxicated.
QFT!
Clayton -
Possibly auto insurance companies would purchase roadways. They could incorporate the cost of maintenance and security into the price of the policy.Users then would be required to purchase their insurance to use the road or treated as trespassers
The insurance company would have a vested interest in posting safe speed limits and other safety measures they deem appropriate
The OP question assumes that there would be roads in an anarcho-capitalist. Does he not realize that the government is needed for roads exist? /sarcasm