Welcome to the first of what I expect to be an ongoing blog series entitled “The Libertarian Alternative.” This series will be used to look at current policy in America and give you a plausible solution for those policies using a libertarian alternative. If there is a topic you would like to see in this blog series, please email me at chair@lpar.org and I will consider using your idea in the next blog!
“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.“ – Dr. Emmett Brown, Back to the Future
There are just some services and products that only the government can provide, like roads, police, fire, etc., right? I submit that this is completely wrong.
First of all, lets look at what happens when the government runs the roads. Most people think this is all done through the gas taxes that are paid on every gallon of gas sold in America. This is not the case. Depending on the source of the information, anywhere from 10% to 35% of the cost for our highway systems are paid by the gas tax. The rest comes from taxes on the purchase of vehicles, other taxes, borrowing from the general fund, and about 5% from tolls.
95% of this funding is taken from our pockets against our will to be used for a product that we may not even use! I have a friend who is legally blind. This man doesn’t own a car and does not drive. He walks to most places he goes to because he chose the location of his home based on the walking distance to certain places he frequents. In the rare instance of needing to travel
further than normal or due to inclement weather, he may take a cab. Should this person be responsible for the same amount of funding for our roads and highways as I am with my 80 mile daily round-trip commute to work every day? Absolutely not! But this is what happens when government is involved in the situation.
This does not even take into account the people who had property taken from them against their will by eminent domain to build the roads, or the distortion of the market for transportation by subsidizing the auto industry through direct subsidies and the inherent benefit the auto industry receives from a government monopoly on the basis of transportation, being roads.
Also, consider the 40,000 deaths per year in traffic accidents on the government owned roads.
What would a “libertarian alternative” to public roads look like? This is hard to say. The invisible hand of the market could take it any number of ways. However, considering our current infrastructure, I think a lot could be done to privatize the roads almost immediately. In fact, many places have already done this. Here is John Stossel’s take on this:
Private road builders are doing this kind of work across the world, such as the double-decker underground highway in Paris, complete with 350 cameras watching for traffic delays or accidents. Any incident is detected in less than 10 seconds. Once the camera detects a problem authorities rush to tow the obstacle away so traffic keeps moving.
They do the same thing in California, too, on at least one road: Highway 91. Instead of building a brand-new road, they added two lanes in the middle of an existing highway. Drivers can choose to use them, or not.
If you want to go this fast, you have to pay. Different amounts depending on the time of day. Sometimes $1.50, sometimes $9. But by paying you save time. Traffic moves. And for some people, time is money.
Were these traffic speeding innovations created by government road-builders? No. They were created and paid for by private road-builders.
Their success has made politicians from other states want to try leasing roads. Mayor Richard Daley did that with the Chicago Skyway. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels leased the Indiana toll road to a private company. He got back billions for his taxpayers.
"We received $4 billion, free and clear, no taxes, no debt left to our kids," Daniels said during our interview in January about the lease agreement signed in 2006.
These are just some of the ways that private roads have been used successfully, and with no tax payer dollars spent on these projects. These are funded through tolls. Polls taken in Washington D.C and Minnesota found that taxpayers overwhelmingly prefer tolls to takes. In DC, 60% preferred tolls and in Minnesota it was 69%.
Competition for the ability to run toll roads would motivate private companies to provide better service, encourage infrastructure construction, and reduce congestion.
But what about the 40,000 deaths per year on our public roadways? Walter Block writes in the introduction to his book The Privatization of Roads and Highways (which can be read for free at the Mises Institute’s website here):
Do not be misled by the oft-made contention that the actual cause of highway fatalities is speed, drunkenness, vehicle malfunction, driver error, etc. These are only proximate causes. The ultimate cause of our dying like flies in traffic accidents is that those who own and manage these assets supposedly in the name of the public — the various roads bureaucrats — cannot manage their way out of the proverbial paper bag. It is they and they alone who are responsible for this carnage.
This does not mean that, were thoroughfares placed in private hands, the death toll would be zero. It would not. But, at least, every time the life of someone was tragically snuffed out, someone in a position to ameliorate these dangerous conditions would lose money, and this tends, wonderfully, to focus the minds of the owners. This is why we do not have similar problems with bananas, baskets, and bicycles, or the myriad other goods and services supplied to us by a (relatively) free-enterprise system.
If the highways were now commercial ventures, as once in our history they were, and upward of 40,000 people were killed on them annually, you can bet your bottom dollar that Ted Kennedy and his ilk would be holding Senate hearings on the matter. Blamed would be "capitalism," "markets," "greed," i.e., the usual suspects. But it is the public authorities who are responsible for this slaughter of the innocents.
As you can see, there are completely viable options other than the public road option. These options are not only cheaper and safer, but they are more moral because they are not built by stealing money from our pockets.
