Comments Elsewhere

geniusNZ: “If everyone owned the road infront of their house Can you imagine having a toll on EVERY section of road as well as signs every 10 meters telling you how much you are going to pay and if you dont want to pay that you need to do a handbreak turn.”

I can imagine any number of things. The question is why in the world you think people would do something that silly. I mean, many people currently own the driveway that leads up to their house, but very few of them place tollbooths on it. Before government got involved in the building of roads, what typically happened was that smaller residential and city roads, and some trails through the wilderness, were built either (1) by cooperative labor or (2) funded by local businesspeople, and then left open for public use; turnpikes were usually limited to large highways. I suspect that much the same thing would happen if roads were privately provided today. Of course, it’s possible that people in some neighborhood or another could be so silly, or hate traffic passing through their neighborhood so much, that they’d put up all kinds of onerous blocks to traffic. But then why bother driving through their neighborhood if they are so uptight about you doing so?

geniusNZ: “The point is that in reality the process of making a market may cost more than operating without it. this may result from the type of good or the way it is used or the externalities etc.”

If your argument is an economic one then I don’t think it’s a very strong one. Roads are not public goods (they are both rivalrous and excludable); it is easy to seek money from anyone who benefits from positive externalities (e.g. asking businesspeople along the road to help with maintenance costs, with the payoff being a better road in front of their business); owners of roads will typically have strong incentives to avoid congestion, and if a patchwork of ownership ends up somehow causing congestion problems then that will just mean that there is an entrepreneurial opportunity for anyone willing to buy up or build a less congested network of roads in the area. (In fact the problems that you mention above are not even problems with externalities at all; they’re alleged problems with transaction costs. But the fact that you transfer control to the government doesn’t mean that transaction costs disappear; it just means that they are shifted from up-front costs to costs hidden within the tax bureaucracy. In fact, given that roads are especially notorious as a source of pork-barrel projects for enterprising legislators, and notoriously unresponsive to commuters’ needs (as opposed to senior legislators’ political priorities), it’s quite likely that road-building and road-maintenance are among the worst examples of the inefficiency created by transferring enterprises from the voluntary sector to the government sector.