Subsidizing the use of roads by letting people use them for free after spending a great deal of money on building and maintaining them is not "market-oriented". Charging people to use them is the closest you can get to market-oriented if you are already stuck with the roads. The most market-oriented solution would be not to build public roads in the first place, but it's too late for that.
Transportation is a good with a large demand. I am certain that, absent the government, quite a bit of transportation would be demanded and provided in the free market. The quantity of roads or rail produced might be less without all the subsidies, but I'm not sure this would be a bad thing. It would certainly be easier on the environment, since transportation tends to be resource-intensive.
The amount of transportation produced in the free market would be equal to the amount that people were willing to pay for, and that seems fair to me. Producing roads that people aren't willing to voluntarily pay for is a social loss. The people paying for the roads would rather use their money for other things. We are taking their consumption away from more highly valued goods and putting it towards lesser valued goods.
That's a bad argument. There's no choice but to use roads, there's no way to create roads without government permission, there's no way to build any infrastructure without complying with myriad of expensive regulations (and for many things there are no way at all - try to build something where government doesn't want to permit something to be built) and they are paid with taxes that aren't exactly voluntary too. So the logic goes is "we control all the environment, we take money from you to create infrastructure the way we want and we ban you from competing with us - and then we demand from you compliance because you have no choice but to use the infrastructure".
If there were an option to use government infrastructure or create and use independent one, then demands on the users of the government one could be justified - our infrastructure, our rules. But instead, there is no choice and the government actively suppresses the possibility of choice arising - in this case, making some demands for using the only possibility available is hypocritical at best.
Interesting opinion.
Americans built free road at the expense of their own future generations.
The author think Americans must stop this spiral and paying the road cost by paying more tax or reduce economic activities by not building and maintaining the road.
Paying more tax would not happens. The Citizen will flee to other states/countries for avoiding high tax(and that place gets free road).
Reducing the economy doesn't work too.
Your future generation unsatisfied the situation(lack of jobs, cultures etc) and flee to other more economically advanced cities/countries(and that place gets free road).
> On top of all that, roads are not "full" markets. This is not a free market solution. You can add a price system. but you don't have supply side effects.
The solution is to auction road capacity and use the auction proceeds to fund maintenance of that road and construction of others. Besides being vastly more efficient (from a market perspective) than an arbitrary fixed rate, it also means that resources are allocated towards roads more efficiently (if your fund allocation mechanism makes some sense).
Their tax dollars paid for them too. There’s no reason businesses should have to pay to use the road, and everybody else shouldn’t. That’s a targeted market intervention, and couldn’t reasonably be described as a free market solution. A general user pays model would be more free market, but then of course you start to economically disenfranchise the poor.
However, constraining productive economic activity as a plan for dealing with inadequate infrastructure development is a fundamentally stupid idea that would impact the prosperity of everybody in the area, whether their business or employment is directly related to transport or not.
Roads are public goods and more importantly they are built with tax money. They are also specifically built for cars to use and without a place to stop they are a bit meaningless in a city.
They might just change this and start charging but that's a pretty stupid idea. Free market is not an answer to everything.
There's an argument which comes up often when talking about a society without a central government: "Who will build the roads?"
Besides the simple idea of neighbours building and maintaining small roads, I argue that I wouldn't want the highway.
Between the ecological damage, the noise, air pollution, increased reliance on shipping things from far away vs buying local - are we really sure building the massive road network in the US was the best option?
Consumerism may be good for the economy, but I argue it's not in our best interest.
Sure, I love the freedom to drive fast anywhere but at what cost?
And who knows, maybe if we didn't have a central entity redistributing resources in an arbitrary way and shaping the market, some entrepreneur would have worked on flying cars and skipped the road altogether.
If the streets aren't free, then even congestion plans can't justly distribute the cost of building and maintaining them.
If the author was concerned about just cost allocation of infrastructure, he'd be arguing for private roads and privatization of existing public roads.
Congestion pricing doesn't "finally" make that clear. Private roads existed before and still do, and don't cost anything those who don't use them.
A distributionist will of course argue for public roads (with or without congestion pricing) because private roads don't give them a way to distort cost allocation to benefit their re-election chances and ideological goals.
Road/car dominance wasn’t exactly established in a free market either.
There’s a whole host of subsidies for building/maintaining roads paid for by everyone [1]. There’s the regulatory advantages driving has (ex: the common zoning requirement that new construction ensure enough parking space [2]). There’s the negative externalities of highways/roadways. (Ex: the health impacts of pollution[3], and the health impacts of sitting in a car rather than walking/biking (part of the way) to their destination [4])
The governments isn't spending billions widening roads out to the exurbs because that's needed to get food and other goods around. If road construction was limited to what benefited everyone--instead of subsidizing particular lifestyle choices--there would be far less of it.
Roads are (mostly) not free, and also cost millions of (insert currency unit here) which are covered by taxes. In particular, the asphalted road in a residential street occupied without charge by someone's expensive vehicle is being paid for by, among other people, me -- and as a non-car-owner, I gain essentially no benefit from the provision of this parking space. So clearly, we've opted as a society for subsidizing public services -- but only certain services.
Transportation may be a good, but infrastructure isn't, and there are good reasons why depending on the free market to invest in infrastructure is a bad idea. It is very hard (and wasteful) to charge for roads. Infrastructure forms a natural monopoly (worse even than the telecom industry). There are huge sunk costs. The existence of roads benefits everybody, even those who don't use them, but nobody wants to pay for them.
I like free markets too, but whenever there's something like the Tragedy of the Commons or Moral Hazard involved, free markets lose much of their advantages.
That's probably why it's better to finance public roads through taxation. We certainly shouldn't strive towards a world where infrastructure is only affordable to some people.
Roads aren't free because they aren't free.
That isn't a tautology, it's a statement of fact: Roads have a dollar value. In nature. In nature it's got a price. Because men will trade, or pay, or war for it.
Therefore, to allocate it efficiently, we should allow it to trade at that value. This is how roads make the most number of people happy.
That may sound like right-wing pablum, but it's a subject that has been well trod by great thinkers for a very, very long time. [1]
[1] Coase, to mention just one
Infrastructure is a natural monopoly. Of course it isn't a free market, just like roads. I wish we had privatized roads, maybe we wouldn't be so car-dependent.
Why just not build the roads and let people do it when they want and can afford it, without stealing money from everyone and redistributing?
Subsidising roads cost is one of the worst thing the government did to the economy and the environment.
I'd much rather live in a world where people have less mobility and there is less pollution, more local products, less cars and less asphalt.
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