KFC has offered to fix Chicago potholes if the city will allow the fried-chicken chain to paint its logo on each repaired pothole.
The city rejected the idea of course, so the taxpayers will get the foot the bill instead.
But why are potholes and road maintenance even an issue? Governments have been telling us for centuries that they must own the roads, that no one else can do it, and that road-building and maintenance is one of the reasons we must have government.
Yet, governments are terrible at this. Daily now, we are inundated with reports of how bridges are falling down, roads are in disrepair, and the infrastructure in general is a nightmare. And this caught government by surprise? The life span of roads and bridges isn’t a big mystery. If roads are the government’s specialty, why are they so lousy at it, and why did they not even notice that their bridges are in lousy shape? It’s not as if this problem couldn’t be anticipated.
So now, everywhere across America, at local, state and federal levels, Americans are being told that taxes must be increased to pay for road and bridge repair. But why? There are already taxes in place for this. The tax revenues for this are generally based on vehicle registration fee revenues, gas taxes, and income taxes. All of these taxes increase either with the number of cars on the road, or with miles driven, or with population growth, or with economic growth. In other words, tax revenues have increased many times over, yet we’re now being told “oops we forgot about the roads, so give us more money.”
Few things better illustrate that we have passed well beyond the point of diminishing returns with the most basic government services. Tax revenues go up and up and up, yet those basic things that the government tells us they must do, but which are nevertheless essential, are relegated to the back burner and forgotten until some future time when a crisis can be declared and more money can be demanded.
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Is this idea generalizable?
The fact that government is bad at x doesn’t immediately imply that some non-government group will be good at it.
I’m not necessarily against the idea, but I don’t see how ad hoc offers by companies to fix roads here & there adds up to a comprehensive system.
I know there are arguments for the feasibility of privately-owned roads, paid for by tolls, etc., but the story here seems to be talking about something quite different from that.
@ Chris
Whichever “system” is in-place, what matters is the incentive structure. What incentive does “the Government” have to do more than the bare minimum? If new contracts, even of the ad hoc variety, were to be struck, at least there’d be an ice cube’s chance in hell of putting a better incentive structure in-place.
This is a very good starting point to teach people about the evils of government. Potholes and collapsing infrastructures are something everybody is likely to meet daily form the travelling salesman to dear old lady. But we’ve got to be careful: we cannot say “roads are in shambles hence government is evil” straight away, otherwise people will think we are crackpots. Illustrate step by step how the ever increasing amount of money that’s supposed to be used for road maintenance gets wasted no matter what and why resurfacing even a hundred yards of road is so unbelievably expensive.
One step at a time, I know the temptation to rush things is strong but remember we have just one chance to make people understand. Blow that and it’s over, you cannot recover them anymore.
Not exactly on topic, but could someone enlighten me on how roads would get built without eminent domain in the first place? This is one area where I have been stumped. Seems wrong to take private property, even for public use, but I just think that to convince every landowner along highly populated terrain to sell (or lease) for a road is a logistical nightmare.
Whilst can imagine highways emerging privately (assuming in the days before cars and streets) I wonder about the streets that everyone lives on? If the streets around your home are privately owned by the one company then you have the problem of one private landowner boxing in another. Or, if two separate street owners own the streets on your home, whilst you do have choice, you still have to choose – you can’t avoid either so it’s almost a quasi-monopoly. And, of course, as street providers buys up the streets it prevent the abillity of new street owner entering the market since people can’t change their home location on a whim. The only solution I can think of where a city emerges without any government would be the street area surrounding a home owner belong to the home owner and represents the ‘right of easement’ for everyone to be able to move about in the city. Inevitably, it’d be up to the home owner as to how they maintain their part of the street and I’d presume if someone got hurt because the home owner failed to maintain his ‘right of easement’ for others, he’d get sued. Which in turn means the home owner would hire asphalting company to pave his road and hire them to fill in potholes every now and then.
@ Humberto,
As libertarians beleive in property ownership derived from homesteading, they reject the doctrine of ad coelum et ad infernos.
So if it comes to it, roads can either be built over or tunneled underneath the property.
Walter Block is the man for this stuff. He has a good Lewrockwell.com podcast on “Road Socialism” here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwHZ_NXENKw , and there’s plenty of discussion on this topic in the Mises forums right now.
Gil,
Absent eminent domain, a “holdout problem” might be avoid by, instead of buying all the land on the proposed route, buying options to buy the land.
I remember seeing on Discovery/National geographic how the SMART tunnel in Malaysia was constructed and the route had to be adjusted to landowner property rights, because in Malaysia it seems to be the case that a landowner owns all the land beneath the surface untill the earth’s core. In the end they still succeeded despite of that the project included major government parties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_Tunnel
Oh and by the way, (imagined) practical difficulties do not override principles, imho.
The reason why governments are so lousy at jobs like filling potholes and cleaning up trash in the parks is precisely because they are so simple and easy. These tasks – which are among the small handful of jobs that most people agree the government should be doing – can be easily accomplished with a small budget and with a fairly small number of low paid workers.
If one wants to put a large number of one’s friends into high paid jobs then one must vastly expand the responsibilities of government and take on all kinds of things like education, poverty relief, libraries, recreation and sports, arts and culture, and so on. Governments have almost unlimited scope in these areas, once they can bully the public into accepting them as something which must be provided by a public monopoly. The payback they get in the form of increased salaries, nepotism, campaign donations and contract kickbacks, etc which are related to these “value added” services is the politicians’ and bureaucrats’ margin of profit.
As long as they are focused on creating and expanding these elaborate and costly services they will naturally tend to neglect the boring, low-margin services such as filling potholes and pickup up trash.
I think the model for how common property such as roads and parks could be maintained is a condominium association (not that roads and and parks necessarily have to be common property – private toll roads and private parks are perfectly viable). These associations are perfectly capable of handling trash collection, road plowing, etc. The reason is that the members of the association strictly limit the responsibilities to only those tasks which are clearly related to common property – maintenance of the roof, the trash dumpster, the lawns, etc. If the superintendant of a condominium association tried to expand into child welfare services, libraries and schools, putting on classical music concerts and so on, he would be quickly shot down or fired as soon as the proposed increase in condo fees was made known.
“we have passed well beyond the point of diminishing returns with the most basic government services”
If it is to be understood rhetorically, then it’s a good rhetorical device. Precisely speaking, though, there are not special points on the marginal utility curves.
Create A Model Classical Liberalism City
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Private Streets And Infrastructure!
I classify the whole issue of ‘public goods’ and eminent domain under a term called ‘Forced Development.’ This macro approach is just as arbitrary as price regulation.
Whose vision for development is being ‘forced’ on people? What would happen if there was no arbitrary development forced on people?
In a classical liberalism society people who want to have ‘infrastructure’ will migrate to places that have contractual relationships in place that foster that type of ‘development.’ If that is indeed a good thing then it will be a very prosperous place and other places will then emulate it and civilization will advance in that way.
At the same time, those people who want less ‘development’ can choose to live in places that have contractual relationships that preserve those type of conditions. Over time they will still evolve along with and parallel to the ever-advancing civilization because the people living in these places will have children and their idealism will have an influence over the long run. Prosperity is very attractive to most people.
Why should the owner have to sell the land in the first place? Most of the roads in this country would function just as well elevated, meaning that only the land needed for pillars would need to be bought/leased. In most cases, a holdout could just be passed over(I think there was an episode of the Simpsons that ended like this).
@humberto
see here too: http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/2022.aspx?PageIndex=1
and here: http://mises.org/Community/forums/p/4846/64000.aspx
Public-private partnerships and trading government welfare for corporate slavery is not a good start: it’s same old political bi-partisanship that’s running everything else, they are just more open with their deal making (“transparency” as they would say).
Underground roads are possible, but would be more expensive. It is a viable option for crowded cities. However, I wonder if the land owner decides to drill a deep hole, what happens to the underground road?
@Humberto
You may also want to read DiLorenzo’s How Capitalism Saved America for an outstanding discussion of the railroads.
Once you learn who JJ Hill was, you will never again ask “How will it ever get built if government doesn’t steal from us to pay for it?”
Instead you will ask, why would anyone ever allow government to steal from us and force us to pay for something that we want and would otherwise build anyway?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Hill
Great, more deficits for this city. Daley should do what he did with the skyway.
This makes for an interesting point of contention. Taking the KFC potholes as a anecdote to illustrate a point (and not a possible solution like some commenter’s have implied) I think the issue at hand is not whether or not the government is taking money to provide a relatively poor service, but whether that service would be better (or more cheaply) provided by private interests. The anecdote raising some interesting questions about how motive might influence the way infrastructure is built (or advertised on) in a privatized system. Or could obscene advertising be considered some kind of coercion that is unacceptable?
To anyone who is saying something like “yeah, but maybe private roads wouldn’t be better” let’s just take a step back and look at the original article.
The government has effectively claimed potholes are less of a public annoyance than advertisements for KFC.
Gil, yes, individual homeowners could own the road immediately surrounding their house, but in many cases, as Oh Henry suggested, it would make sense for a homeowner’s association to have the responsibility of maintaining the roads, and this would be something you would agree to when you bought a house in that association’s area.
As for eminent domain, no, we certainly don’t want that, and no, underground or above-level streets aren’t the most practical solution, although they may be appropriate under certain situations.
The important thing to remember is that there is a market for roads, since they provide a service people find worthwhile, and there is a market for land. Obviously the value of a particular road or route would modify the value of particular pieces of land, until, as the market usually does, the clearing price that balances the value of a road to the value of the land is reached–it’s all a matter of how much value people place on the roads and the land. And don’t forget that roads would also compete with alternative transportation, like passenger rail services, which would affect the value of the roads.
Finding the economic value of roads (and transportation in general) would also help us discover costs of transportation that government is quite simply unable to calculate, by any reasonable measure.
Last, but not least, for those who are concerned about pragmatism and persuading the public, roads are a great area to try private experiments, because there are so many roads. Why not let housing associations take over the maintenance of the roads in their area? Why not let businesses take over roads in their immediate area? Industrial parks? A few “practical”, real-life experiments would show how privatization of the roads could work, would help develop the market for roads, and would help persuade the public that government really isn’t needed for building and maintaining roads in general.
An impotant question has not been considered: do we even want roads? A dirt track would fill most needs and is a lot cheaper. This would of course mean major changes to our way of life (no travel when it rains/snowmelts). However roads must not be assumed. If we settled for dirt tracks in front of our house we each could save a weeks worth of work every year (either as vacation, or for some other consumer good)
We could still have highways (though parking your car is an issue since most wouldn’t go all the way home). Or hop on a railroad of some sort. The last mile is expensive to maintain and few people care about the road in front of your house.
@Gil and others:
Don’t assume we “need” roads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_pack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_IB3PmlVaI
http://www.urbanaero.com/Xhawk_vehicle.htm
If “the market” creates a problem by locking people into their property, “the market” creates the solution by offering jet packs and other such mechanisms.
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