The feds help build roads from federal road and fuel taxes, so they should have a hand in rebuilding and maintaining.
It's funny that people in the government are blaming the government for the problem. While they are busy spending money on more important things.
This isn't the first time a bridge has collapsed in the US or Canada. Like everything else, it will be on everyone's agenda until it's out of the headlines.
The point is that the political provision of these services is open to abuse and will be abused. The system has to change.
This sounds like a great idea. As long as the stocks for the business were a direct representation of the tolls being payed this would be a great way to decentralise government control without the usual pitfalls of privatisation. The model could probably be applied to a lot of services I think.
Certainly with electronic tolling it would be easy to see how much each person paid in during the year and refund the surplus on a pro rata basis. This sort of model is something I came up with to deal with privatization of sole provider services. And I do think it can be applied to other issues.
For instance one can privatize the distribution of water or sewers this way. Of course many sole provder services are that way only because of technological issues. And new technologies will resolve some of those problems. For instance go back to the debates about deregulating telephone service and you will find opponents ridiculing the idea because it would require "stringing up several sets of wires". Now a lot of the phones don't eve both with wires.
And it may not be necessary to put all roads under this system. For instance you can have residential roads as common shared property of the residents the way hallways in condominiums are. Roads in business areas can belong to associations of business owners who will have the incentive to keep them free and well maintained to attract customers. Onwership can be collective and private and devolved to the people who are directly impacted.
And of course there ought to be no state monopoly granted. That is if someone else wants to build a private highway or private bridge to compete they should be allowed to do so to encourage the innovation that comes from competition.
Many of the state roads do not have controlled entry in cities and towns and do not lend themselves well to being toll roads.
For some roads, it could work. For others, I don't see it. The problem would be in limiting free riders but preserving public access. At least I don't have to bring up Nozick's quip about helicopters for this scheme!
As for roads as common property, isn't that done in St. Louis and in some parts of the Netherlands?
"And of course there ought to be no state monopoly granted. That is if someone else wants to build a private highway or private bridge to compete they should be allowed to do so to encourage the innovation that comes from competition."
I don't think this would be a problem, the competition from the collectively owned business should keep them in check. I never got around to replying to your comments on the previous comment section, I was away from my computer for a few days. I'd like to reply to a couple of things if you don't mind. Feel free to remove it if you feel it's inappropriate (I don't know why I said this, heck it's your blog)
A. "the poor get poor and the rich get richer"
When this is statement is used it's used as a relative term, sure, the poor don't get poorer, but the gap between rich and poor gets wider. This is a problem because the amount of influence the rich have increases, and thus we get the rich acting as an aristocracy.
B. The point I was making by saying, "own all the grocery stores" was better stated when I said, "Collective agreements are not just confined to workers."
Businesses will often cut deals with each other to set prices, they will sometimes merge, and even though new competition will spring up every now and then the drive to collectivise is stronger than the alternative.
Just to illustrate, if you have ten companies each run by ten people, that's still only one hundred people, and with the nature of multi-corporations in this era I think it's important not to encourage small numbers of people to have undue influence over the majority.
The feds DO NOT use federal fuel tax for funding of roadways.That money goes to the general fund.The money in highway bills has no coralation to the money collected.
Ben: you are right and wrong at the same time. It all depends on what form of road pricing is used. First you don’t need controlled entry points with ERP (electronic road pricing). A car driving through the area without the transponder sets off an alarm that results in photographing the vehicle and sending a traffic ticket.
But one can have a road pricing system that is a combination of two systems. One is that vehicles are charged a specific minimal amount per mile driven within the state. Then the major roads may have surcharges or congestion charges on them which use the transponders to automatically deduct the fees from an account. There would be no free riders. This is one of the technological issues I mentioned that has been solved.
You are correct that some residential streets in St. Louis were turned over to the residents as owners. Interestingly the common ownership of the street created bonds between neighbors that didn’t exist and people started looking out for each other. The crime rate on the privatized streets dropped dramatically because the people now watched what was happening to each other.
David: Relative poverty strikes me as absurd. Even if a community of millionaires someone is at the bottom and thus “relatively poor” compared to others. And the influence of the rich is dependent on the power of the state. For instance most goods are produced for the masses not for the elite few. But in markets all groups have things produced for their benefit. Sometimes the elite products end up as mass produced once the rich have covered the cost of R&D -- video recorders were like that.
Collusion between businesses doesn’t work well or for long. The economic incentives are to be the first to break the deal. The natural tendency is to maximize profit and to do that you grab the biggest market share first. If all are exactly the same then one of them suddenly lowering a price or improving quality finds a bigger market share and higher profits. In addition they each are worried that others will do this which pushes them to break the deal as well.
And in the age of multinational corporations the amount of competition tends to increase not decrease. Only by a very limited defintion of competition does your fear hold up. For instance when I was a kid there were the big three auto makers and that was pretty much it for Americans. Under globalization and multi-naitonalisation the number of car companies selling to Americans increased dramatically. So from a choice of a Ford, a Chrysler or a GM car the choices now include Korean, Japanese, British, French, German and Swedish cars.
The small number of people who “controlled” the car market in 1960 have been overtaken by a lot more competition. Look at how the TV big three monopoly was broken. The “undue” influce of big newspapers like those of Hearst or McCormack are now struggling to fight off competition from millions of news sources including bloggers.
The reality is that the big corporations benefit from restricted access and regulated markets. Historically they have pushed for such things. Big Business was the driving force behind antiTrust laws (see Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism). In the deregulated, or uncontrolled markets competition explodes and the influence of any major player is reduced.
We saw that in airlines, we saw it with television, we saw it with telephones. I used to have a relatively pricey US phone number which could be only answered standing with a few feet of the actual device. Now I have a US number that costs me nothing and which rings on my computer no matter where I live. I used to pay up to $3 or more per minute to make international calls. Now many I make cost me nothing or a few cents a minute. Technology destroyed the monopoly -- the issue raised with the roads.
People,to have private roads you would need to transfer all powers of imminate domain to the private sector.We have enough problems after Kelo.A nation of private roads cannot exist with a nation of property rights.
Michael: I think you are wrong on that. Private roads have been built without eminent domain. And you don't know your history. Most roads were privately built in the early US and the last private turnpike only died out just before the era of the car -- if they had held on just a little longer. There have been highways built without eminent domain.
I would not favor giving eminent domain rights to the private sector -- I don't like govt. having that right. And a huge percentage of roads, especially in suburbs are built privately as part of the housing complexes.
CSL,your talking about a time when a private land holder might own the sum of a small state.I'd rather it be private too,yet with the make up of the country now I don't think it fesible.
How do you know what I'm talking about? The highway I referred to that was built privately was in Houston and wasn't that long ago.
Of course, if you are right, and it isn't feasible then why oppose allowing people to do what they can't do if allowed to do it?
I am positive the writer here, who believes that George Bush should stay out of state affairs, never for a second blamed the Bush administration for the handling of Katrina!
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