The “Who Will Build The Roads?” crowd is forever asking this question. Sadly, just as many right-leaning free market-types as left-leaning anti-capitalists can’t understand how a free society would provide roads. The thing about the free market is that it’s so dynamic, and innovation occurs at such a pace, that it’s not too far to suggest that roads would become obsolete if the state got out of the way.
January 21st, 2013 at 10:25 am
Rather than theory, can you name a society without government that built good and efficient roads?
January 21st, 2013 at 11:24 am
Many of the roads in early America were privately built and maintained. See this entry from wikipedia:
“According to Gerald Gunderson’s Privatization and the 19th-Century Turnpike, ‘In the first three decades of the 19th century Americans built more than 10,000 miles [16,000 km] of turnpikes, mostly in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. Relative to the economy at that time, this effort exceeded the post-World War II interstate highway system that present-day Americans assume had to be primarily planned and financed by the federal government’.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United_States
Of course then you have free market transportation with Cornelius Vanderbilt’s extensive shipping that out-performed his subsidized competitors, and James J. Hill’s private transcontinental railroad that didn’t take a penny of government funds.
By the time the automobile entered the market governments had already assumed many of the functions that markets had taken care of previously, so over the last hundred years or so there aren’t many cases. However, there are a few private highways, and some private residential streets. Consider also private parking lots and garages, which are typically better maintained than the government’s roads.
This raises a question that was begged in your comment, which is are there any “good and efficient” roads the government manages? Many of the government roads I travel on are poorly maintained, have pot holes, cracks, and debris strewn about on them. Accidents occur frequently, and congestion is ubiquitious.
January 21st, 2013 at 12:03 pm
The US was well known for its bad roads 200 years ago, prior to the Cumberland road.
January 21st, 2013 at 11:52 am
Excellent recounting of historical facts.Thank you Joel! It was a reminder and an inspiration. I would ask “James Madison” this as to the future: who among us could have even barely imagined the wealth of things we rely on and enjoy that have come about in just the past 40 years.
In fact, most of these “wonders” received their impetus when the government granted monopoly to AT&T was discarded. The common reaction was negative and cries of impending chaos were heard far and wide.
The freedom to imagine a non monopolist system resulted in an explosion of new ideas, which became new products and services. It is difficult to describe to someone even in their thirties, how different things were in the 1970′s, let alone the 1940′s.
If there is cause for optimism, it is that we have abundant proof in many areas that the more freedom allowed, the more people have the incentive to think, develop, create, and then trade. Voluntary, open exchange works. Top down central control does not. No one person or small governmental group can even imagine what the future can bring in answers and solutions to problems.