What does “fourth power” mean? Well, a single axle on a car has, say, 1,500 lbs / 680 kg of weight on it. A semi truck, OTOH, has 10,000 lbs / 4500 kg of weight per axle. The semi:car axle weight ratio is thus in the neighborhood of 6.67. 6.67 to the fourth power is 1,980. So a single semi axle does as much damage to the road as 1,980 car axles. A semi truck has four mass-bearing axles, whereas a passenger car has only two, so that’s 3,960 cars to equal the damage done by one truck.

The end result is that the trucking industry would fall apart overnight if they were forced to pay for the highway repair costs that they’ve successfully externalized via lobbying.

In order for Carson or Long to make such a claim, they will have to show that the state intervention of providing transportation subsidies (in the form of road, railroad, airports, etc) exceeded whatever private actors would have assembled in the counterfactual example.

I don’t think Carson and Long necessarily claim that a private road system would never have developed to the extent that public roads did. Rather, their point is that with a private road system businesses that rely on high-volume long distance transportation would have to internalize these costs. It is not the extensiveness of public roads but the fact their costs are socialized that amounts to a subsidy for the most frequent users.

Second, is it the word “corporation” that trips up these left-libertarians? I remember a whole chapter in Rotherbard’s Man, Economy and State on joint-stock companies. Somehow this chapter isn’t cited in Carson’s manifesto, for example.

Even though “corporations” could exist on the free market with no state privilege or backing, the state has monopolized this too, and sharply defines who a “shareholder” is.

Au contraire, mon frere, a corporation is, by definition, a creature of the state.

Perhaps you mean to say that free men can freely set up business ventures in any manner that suits their needs; and that ventures with capital lenders being treated as capital equity partners sans liability is possible. A “corporation,” however, with its pernicious concept of diffused decision making via (sacre bleu!) the ballot box, of centralized grants of immunity and separation of capital and control, could not arise in a free market.

But why? It’s because, I think, that when a corporation arises under current law it becomes an individual. In Rothbardia commercial cooperation, especially the present exchange of future goods via contract, would not depend on or require the birth of something independent from the contracting individuals. Nor would the “laws” of liability. And if there’s no reason for something to be created, it will not be. The entire history of corporations is merchants begging the state for something. In Rothbardia the individual begs no one for anything, least of all from a wanna-be king.

There is, I think, no large-scale, complex and capital intensive commercial venture that would in any way require “incorporation” to achieve all that “corporations” purport to achieve, even in our current system, let alone in Rothbardia.

Here’s my line of intuition/insight: I’m a piano technician, full-time for the last 15 years or so, part-time now that I’m back in school. When I buy parts, tools, etc. I sometimes use a supply house in Chicago, sometimes one in Clawson, MI, and sometimes one in Vancouver. Each has their own niche, each has some products the others don’t. My purchases from the first two are “domestic trade” and from the third, “foreign trade”. Yet from my point of view, it’s all trade. I’m just buying stuff I need from a supplier that has it to sell. Why should these transactions be treated differently?

The answer, obviously, is the existence of the State. As Hoppe (one of my intellectual idols) pointed out, the State claims a territorial monopoly on taxation, and must enforce this claim as a matter of survival. Thus the State must define internal and external transactions for tax purposes, and then encourage internal and discourage external transactions. Even in a regime of more or less free trade between the US and Canada, there are still administrative requirements that increase transaction costs for foreign vs domestic trade. Likewise, the central bank must also claim and enforce a territorial monopoly on money as a precondition for conducting monetary policy and controlling the banking industry. Thus we have a distinction between transactions that can be completed with one government’s fiat currency vs transactions that require exchanges of different fiat currencies. None of this would apply without nation-states and their currency and trade interventions.

Here’s the practical result: When I order from Chicago or Michigan, I make my order, pay with my credit or check card, and get my stuff usually in 3 days. When I order from Vancouver, the supplier has to fill out customs paperwork, pay a small duty that he includes in his prices, and it ends up taking 7-10 days to get my stuff. Distance only accounts for part of this. In addition, he prefers that I pay by check because this incurs less cost for him in converting $US to $CD. So he ends up waiting another week after I get my shipment, with invoice, before he gets paid. This happens only because of the existence of the State.

The economics profession accepts the existence of these monopolies pretty much unquestioningly. We talk about national income accounting. The US isn’t a firm or a household. In fact, there are a myriad of firms and households in the US, and each one has its own priorities and set of accounts. The only reason anyone thinks about national income accounting is because we are all bound up in the same political and monetary monopoly. Balance of payments is also an issue. But would it be a valid concept at all if there weren’t a central bank with a central repository of foreign assets (even including a little gold) to gain or lose because of current account imbalances? And would we care about an imbalance if it didn’t mean “foreigners” (political them vs political us) were gaining “our” assets? Add to this, of course, the fact that we wouldn’t even be in our current economic situation without the assistance of our central bank and its monetary monopoly.

A more complete and, I hope, more coherent essay is in the works.

For example I have to be convinced whether the state’s roads are an example of a transportation subsidy that props up the megacorp form over smaller, and more numerous geographically-distributed manufactories. Because of the limits of our historical knowledge, a thymological approach seems to be quite difficult.

In order for Carson or Long to make such a claim, they will have to show that the state intervention of providing transportation subsidies (in the form of road, railroad, airports, etc) exceeded whatever private actors would have assembled in the counterfactual example.

But can they do this?

I don’t know how. In Thomas DiLorenzo’s “How Capitalism Saved America”, if I remember correctly, he wrote about how there was over 200 companies located in some New England state alone that were engaged in the private road (turnpike) business at the turn of the last century. Who is to say that a continental-wide series of interconnected private turnpikes would have proved impossible if the state didn’t intervene? Maybe we can’t imagine it today because of current housing densities (also created by the state nationalizing 1/3 of the country’s landmass), but who is to say that it would have been impossible?

I don’t know too much about the NYC subway system, but what I do know is that it was constructed by private companies. It might be fruitful to learn whether this was done with state intervention to force homeowners to allow the subway’s underground easements. If someone could point me to such a resource, it would be highly appreciated.