@@Litany_of_Furybut why tanks? wheeled transport can better use the existing road infrastructure and minimize wear and tears. Thus retaining the ability for profit.
Wasn't there a thing a few years ago where a guy built a road in the UK because the "official" road was under years of "repair". He built a road, put up a box to charge tolls and completely ignored the people who refused to pay (ie, he didn't care if people using it refused to pay). Eventually, the govt road got fixed and people stopped using his road. At the end of the day, he didn't make much money but he also didn't lose any.
There was a government that said it would cost $65,000 to build some steps. A guy decided to make the steps for $550, but the government came and tore it down. edition.cnn.com/2017/07/20/americas/man-steps-trouble-trnd/index.html
In 2014, English businessman Mike Watts of Kelston, Somerset - Faced with months of roadworks and a 22km diversion around a busy commuter route, rented a nearby field - and became the first private individual in Britain to build a toll road in more than a century. Watts spent £150 000 building the unofficial road next to the A431, where a small section had been cordoned off.
@@TheImperatorKnight yeah but they meet all the health and safety regs, and the committee to decide the name of the project, and the other committee to decide how it effects the disenfranchised needed to be paid at least a couple grand each.
Everyone knows you can't pave a road without a local politician actually mixing the asphalt themselves because they are the ones that own the local paving company and award all the contracts to themselves
I mean, you chose them so that's what you want. You cant really be full on liberterian/Anarcho-capitalist and expect others to be responsible for you. You are on your own. If you dont like them just vote them out. If you cant outfight a monopolic corporation in a political struggle. Tough shit.
@@gupler So I have to validate an oppressive system by voting in a two party oligarchy or I lose the right to complain that the two party oligarchy is oppressing me? Make it make sense.
I remember an economist mocking the notion of "who will build the roads?" He said, at one place we have someone who built an amazing complex factory, in another place we have someone who built an amazing complex shopping center...and the two are just gonna look at each other and be stumped as to what do next? Anyone capable of building a factory, or store, or subdivision is going to find the task of road building ridiculously simple.
That's stepping past all the middle ground... Nobody is building that factory without access to labor, water and raw materials. Guess what that requires as the pre-requisite? Oh... the road... The shopping mall wouldn't exist without access to the sheer scale of population to make it worthwhile as well as the large volume of warehouses needed to supply it, which means again... the road. Not a dirt path, a road that in ancient times was suitable for carriages and wagons or today supports a 32 ton vehicle traveling at 75 miles per hour safely. So you won't even have the investment in the factory without adequate investment in infrastructure in the first place! In an industrial economy (that can only exist AFTER roads as mentioned) the cost is minimal. However in a low output pre industrial society you need to pool the resources of a lot more people in order to build the road. So either you need a full anarchist view of everyone agreeing, and this would be getting ten thousand people to agree, or you need someone who merely owns all the land everyone is working on and he gives everyone no choice but to work on his road project or be evicted from his property. AKA... Feudalism. Then you consider the point of an investment in capital be it a factory or a road from a capitalism perspective is to rake in as much money as possible as quickly as possible. Not to generate income for future generations but to make money NOW. So the person who builds that toll road is incentivized to charge as much as people can possibly pay to use it. He will keep upping the rates on the road until people stop using it and then back off. This will maximize his profits off the project and benefit him now. This means that the road is so expensive to use that say... Supplying a theoretical factory with it is no longer worthwhile because transportation is now 90% of the price of goods (as it was for 99% of human history.) The man who owns the road has no incentive to reduce the price for a theoretical return on a theoretical increase of traffic from a factory that may or may not be developed to take advantage of the lower price. There's no guarentee that such a thing will happen and in fact in his current environment (99% of human history) there's no evidence any such thing would ever happen so he won't relent on the price. Further he has no experience in factories or mass production himself so he won't be using capital from his roads to invest in a factory on his own road. That's not how it works. It's similar to communists saying the American industrial revolution came because of slavery ignoring the fact that all the proceeds from slavery went to buying more land and more slaves. It's the same thing. In other words the economist you were listening to was a Chicago school formulae idiot. We've followed the Chicago school since the 1980s and by 2008 we got so poor enough people couldn't afford houses that it crashed the entire global economy.
@@colonel__klink7548So roads can't be built without roads? One has to wonder if the first meter of the so called "road" was a gift from aliens. Or perhaps Jesus created the first road as a blessing upon our world.
@@colonel__klink7548 Have you not defeated your own argument? If building a new road is a prerequisite to building a shopping centre, then it will be a part of the investment cost. Also 10,000 people can agree to pool together resources to do something, it’s called investing. One does this mysterious and arcane form of action usually in a place called a ‘Stock Market’. Also on your point that there is no guarantee that prices will fall if the cost of using the road falls, the counter is this: There is no guarantee that anything will happen, there are incentives that push people to make decisions but the deciding is up to the individual. The road builder is incentivised, heavily may I add, to set the ‘market price’ as his price as that will ensure the greatest amount of profit. Also the claim that Capitalism is all about short term profit is utter nonsense. It is precisely the opposite, Socialism is the system that cares about short term profit the most. It’s literally in the name, CAPITAL, which requires savings, i.e thinking long term. Capitalism is much more far sighted since one must save and plan to acquire capital. Socialism is very short sighted since it encourages theft. One sees the headline profits but never the countless years worth of work that were done to achieve it.
@@colonel__klink7548 Wow! That was a massively long reply which said absolutely nothing! The simplest answer is that if there is a demand for something to be done, it will be done. It is as simple as that.
I live in rural Canada. They "fix" the roads every fall, just in time for the winter to wreck them again. There's about a month without potholes. Everyone has a tractor, we could fix them ourselves very easily but someone needs that fat government contract.
I'm forced to wonder if these leeching companies also practice poor workmanship. I live in the northern USA and as a child potholes were very common. In the past decade however, many of my town's roads have been resurfaced and...no potholes have appeared. Potholes are primarily caused by frost heaving, so I assume whichever company constructed the most recent roads did a quality job leveling and draining the roadways. Or at least, it seems like potholes are not as inevitable as I had once assumed.
Which is EXACTLY how railroads were built. Private companies looking to make a profit, built railroads to connect markets so they could ship goods from one market to another.
I'll 1up you: The city of Brunswick, which had the first trainstation in Germany (it was later torn down and thus people don't count it as such anymore), had a circle of heavy and high tech industry for its time surrounding the inner city. Those companies then laid an extension to the failway that encircled the city so that they could bring resources and goods right to their companies' doorsteps. That track is today mainly a city-encircling park between the inner and outer city.
Correct ✅ 💯 the government has become a cartel, skimming off the top to feed more government, and actually suppressing the very same road building that they were voted in to do 🤦♂️
They're building a sidewalk on the main road by my apartment, they estimated 2 years, to build about 1 mile of sidewalk, 2 miles if you count both sides. Keeping in mind "2 years" in Houston construction language is typically closer to 5 years. Not the most glaring endorsement of publicly funded roadways.
Oh how H9uston has fallen. I still live there but in a suburb. I remember how construction worked as a kid to what you say now and I'm so sad. The reason we knew about it, besides seeing it ourselves, was bc there were news stories and articles about how places all over the world were copying how we designed and built our roads. When a bid was out out it had a time table built in. There were de a dlines for phases and completion. There was a stash of "weather days" that could be applied and a way to petition for more the weather was just that bad that year. Companies had to be on time or once they got too late there were penalties. If the got done early they got bonuses. But there was also strict inspections so no corner cutting. It's not hard to create a good incentive structure for a timely project. Apparently they just don't care anymore. And from the costs I see, it's not bc they can do it cheaper this way. People really need to figure out who is profiting, this reeks of corruption.
Here in the US early in our development a lot of roads were built by companies or private citizens, they were typically toll roads. So yeah, this is definitely a thing.
I remember being in NY state, all the highways are toll roads. Made my blood boil. Here in Texas we have toll roads, but we also have freeways, key word "free" way. Because the whole point of a toll road is that you're paying to get there faster, because there's less traffic. Making every highway a toll road is just an extra tax, on the roads we already paid for.
They were most often known as Plank Roads since they were made of planks....or rather rather large ties similar to the ones railroads use but much longer. Nearly all wagon trails were "built" by people using them, thereby creating a trail. Some of the well traveled ones, once the west started to get established, were improved and modified by the stage coach companies or private interest. Usually a collective group of business leaders Village Fathers from area communities for just the purpose TiK expressed. They had a financial incentive to expand the their cities by making more reliable connections between them.
In the storm ravaged mountains of North Carolina, the town of Chimney Rock was cut off and likely would be for months if not a year or more. The state DOT said they'd send surveyors and engineers as did the Army Corps of Engineers. No one came. But a half dozen mineworker guys from West Virginia came down, lived in tents for near three weeks and build a road opening up the area. The locals call them "The West Virginia Boys". Can's say if the petty bureaucrats will take revenge on the men, but if they do, I'd advise bureaucrats avoid going in the mountains of North Carolina for a decade or so. A good description of how the township government develops to provide roads, etc. is given in 'Civil Government in the United States' (1902), John Fiske He also discusses the origins of the township from Greece through England.
@@gbcb8853 What do you think a road has been for near the entirety of human civilization and even now? It is called a dirt road, a road does not need asphalt and neon lights to be a road, HIGH traffic HIGH wear roads are the ones that receive gravel, brick, cement, or asphalt treatment normally but do not hold monopoly on the term "road" in any reality.
^ False, and vacuous 😂 . In reality the government is to blame for the pish poor state of the roads, both in the UK and basically all other countries with bad roads.
I wouldn't mind paying a toll to use a private road. Will save me from having to replace bushings, shocks and struts and tires on my car due to potholes.
Coming from Sydney Australia, I completely disagree with your statement. Then again, the tolled roads in Sydney have a shit load of Government intervention involved, so not really private.
Don't worry, you can go to Italy, pay hundreds and hundreds in tolls and, because the motorway is a natural monopoly, the company will start neglecting maintenance. That's how Genova bridge and other bridges starting crumbling into pieces. Obviously these people are too rich to actually go to prison.
@@jossdeibossyeah , but I imagine the reason it is a monopoly and still is, because of government intervention, probably with zoning laws, tax cuts, and bail outs. There would be no such thing as a monopoly In a free market
There was small community in rural Brazil that had to rebuild their old bridge after it fell down due to heavy rain. The government estimated it would cost 4 million dollars and a few years to rebuild it, the community did it with a quarter million dollars in a few months. A lot of people said it wouldn't last the first rain. Rio Grande do Sul, their state, had one of the worst rains in their history in the beginning of this year but the bridge still stands.
I love this type of content. It amazes me how obvious this all should be yet, people simply can’t get their minds around anyone other than the government doing things for them. Keep up the great work!
That roads "game" essentially recreates the building of the railway network in Britain. Private railway companies saw opportunities for profit by building routes between major towns and linking the industrial centres. They had wealthy backers, investors and shareholders, who bought up land along the routes. And then the rail companies added to their profits by building houses alongside the tracks and even created new towns in the countryside where the wealthier townspeople could move to, to escape the noise, dirt and overcrowding of the bigger towns and then commute to their jobs on the trains. Some lines extrnttded to the coast and opened this up to more town dwellers to take a day trip to enjoy the fresh sea air, which in turn drove the expansion of coastal towns into holiday resorts, many of which were previously small fishing communities, bringing increased wealth to those areas .
Actually, it also serves the model of the canal network. Canals were out-competed by rail, just as rail was out-competed by road. However rail was undone precisely because roads were/are funded from general taxation. Road pricing is the way of the future.
Those train firms were corporations. Corporations are legal entities encoded under government enforced law. WIthout government, these corporations and their ability to have limited liability, in order to sell shares to public buyers (ie. share holders), would simply not be able to do that. There's no reason to sell shares without limited liability - a firms sells shares so that it can get additional money that it needs, but then it has to promise returns to those holders. If it also had to be fully liable for the full value of the company, then the cost outweighs the benefit. This is because firms are run by humans, and humans aren't masochistic about improving their earnings, unless they can get something extra out of it (ie. the whole profit incentive again). That's the reason shares of ownership were first invented as a financial instrument in the Netherlands c. 17th century. The boat merchants didn't want to risk their whole boat on a trading voyage, so they divvied up the ownership with their friends in exchange for shared returns. So much paper can get torn up if it's unenforced by an objective (to the best of it's ability, anyway; usually that's why there's laws to help them practice jurisprudence) third party. Do you think people like complicated paper work? They'd tear it up, because it's just a piece of paper, and they'd think they were getting scammed. Unenforced, it's easy for a lot of scammers to get involved anyway. This is why in the game Eve Online, no one buys shares in any corporations, *even though that's a vanilla feature of the game* . They don't buy the shares, because there's just too many scammers out there who promise returns to the owners, then take the money and run. The space police in the game (it's a game about spaceships btw), are not there to enforce contracts, only to perform basic peace keeping in high security zones. The collateral mechanic for contracts works fine though, but contracts have to remain very basic like "transport this item here".
@@gbcb8853 On the other hand, government subsidies can fire up an economy faster and allow countries to be first in doing something. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it gives them propagandistic bragging rights a lot of the time
@@Usammityduzntafraidofanythin there's no "firing up" it just redistributes what one group of people has to the other. the government action didn't create anything that couldn't be possible voluntarily.
What happens when the person who owns the road says "this is my private property, and I don't like you, so you can't use this road. The one in front of your house/business"?
Use a different road, if that doesn't exist, build your own or show entrepreneurs that there is demand for more roads, if that doesn't work talk to the owner, ask him why he doesn't want to do business with you. Ultimately, it's unprofitable to exclude paying customers from buying your product, thus this scenario is unlikely to happen in the first place.
@@benshiotsu8553 yes, but that’s public vs private property. Do they really own the road if they can’t control it? Maybe if that’s a sacrifice they are willing to make in creating a road, giving up some rights to it, but then you have the free rider problem.
@@Destroyer11204 have you heard of what lead to Killdoser? It was exactly that: a business working with the city to basically ruin a man’s livelihood by owning the land one needs to cross to use his property and denying it to him. Talking doesn’t always work because people aren’t always rational, let alone correct. And even then, sometimes it is within your best interests to remove someone from the board.
@@Destroyer11204As if humans are only driven by rationality. If another human being dislikes you enough, chances are they'll find a way to screw with you even if it is unprofitable for them.
Hey TIK, Just wanted to say I really enjoy your content and I'm starting to look more into your books you recommend and the ideas you say. I appreciate your hard work in sourcing and telling it as it is, thanks for everything! Your friend - E.
TIK, idk about using a video game to prove your point, because in video games (generally) central planning works better due to: 1) player literally knows the future 2) player is generally competent and omniscient 3) it's hard to create competent AIs to simulate mass scale decision making
people that think the government build roads have a lot of explaining to do regarding the countless individuals who literally moved mountains to create a safer shortcut from one village to another, oftentimes without any kind of finacial incentive, but merely to make things easier for themselves, and others in the process
You described a scenario in which you have a secure monopoly. If you do not have a monopoly, once you build the roads, a competiton would emerge, which will use your roads and you would be on the losing side (your competiton would not have to come up with the costs of roads). And if you somehow charge for the roads, this is ta least a local monopoly scenario, not exactly free market.
Thing is, here in the US, this is exactly how the original roads were built. And yes, they DID get built - often in patchwork and inefficient fashion because different companies had different priorities in different areas. We had plenty of private tollways and turnpikes but they often only serviced regional concerns because that was where the money was. Government didn't need to build ALL the roads, but it needed to build SOME in order to coordinate things, as well as to build the National Highway System.
I haye a post on X that shows this is how most UK roads were built historically before being seized by the state. I can provide you the PDF of the historical study that contained maps and statistics on the builders. This video could have used 2-3 more minutes of referencing that forgotten history. Love the use of OpenTTD to make a point. Well done!
This question got answered definitively this week, Dominoes pizza started paying to fill in potholes in some towns where the government was refusing to
As a village folk i have something to add, if lets say roads are built entirely by business I dont think there would be much incentive for companies to build roads there despite it being profitable in total. Why? Well for transport companies it would be a low priority as villages give smaller margins and would require more infrastructure for less people. And for companies who take in these villagers its unlikely theyd see enough of a profit individually to justify the cost of a road, the populace of a village is gonna work in dozens of different businesses so even if the villagers make enough profit in total to justify a road a few times over not any company has enough share of this profit to justify building one. What do you think?
Then the villagers will move or build a road themselves. That's like asking "but who will build me a tram line if I decide to live in the Himalayas?" If you want roads you move somewhere where there are roads or you build them yourself/pay someone to do it for you.
Yes the lower profit margins indicate less importance and that resources could be better utilised elsewhere. This is not really a problem but just being efficient with scarce resources. Also the villagers can pool their resources together. This is usually called investing or buying shares. Several villagers can contribute and thus get portions of the profit from tolls.
For ancaps it really doesn't matter whether the government builds them or not. The ideological comittment to a non-government society is honestly sad sometimes. Free people can do whatever they want, including volunteering to live on land subject to a state by contract, and thus paying taxes.
I can't believe someone as intelligent as you can have such a simplistic view of these issues. There are a ton of situations in which building a road is not economically profitable, but necessary due to social issues (transporting elder people in a rural area to the hospital...or would you let them rot and die cos it isn't economically profitable?), environmental issues (a road to give forestry firefighters access to forestry fires before they become a maestrom out of control that destroys entire towns), cultural issues (a road to show the people some part of their history, like an excavation in the middle of nowhere)....I could spend a week writing examples. I guess when you were younger you embraced the left too much, got dissapointed and then went to the other extreme, embracing it, yet again, too much. Life is not about what is profitable or efficient. Culture, Art, Education and long list of important things in life aren't. Our own planet is not profitable or efficient. Our own existence, as humans, is not profitable or efficient. Should profits and efficiency be considered in any project? Of course. Should those things being the only consideration? No fucking way. Taking care of my old and sick parents is not profitable or efficient for me (I'd inherit money - profit -if I let them die, I'd save a lot of time taking care of them if I let them die), but I do it with all my heart, cos I'm human, not a fucking Excel table.
@@oalalv_raoaov I don't know which kind of elder people you know, but my parents and most of the elders I know are not parasites, they worked hard during most of their lives, so they do deserve we take care of them, the same way they took care of us when we were kids. That applies everywhere in the world. It's sick that someone can think of our elders like parasites. In my case, being Spanish, I can tell you that their generation is the best generation my country has had in centuries, much better than mine and much better than my daughter's. They not only worked hard in their proffessional lives to make our country a good place to live, but they also did their very best to give their children the greatest chances to grow into good adults. And they also fought to recover the freedom we lost in the Spanish Civil War. You don't see that level of sacrficie anymore in this individualistic world... I feel sorry for you thinking about your elders in that way. Anyway, in a few decades, when you are an elder yourself, you'll answer your own question all by yourself.
Private charity exists. Just recently after the flooding in NC there was community cut off. State officials said it would take maybe a year to rebuild the road to them. WV boys came and rebuilt the road in a month, out of the goodness of their hearts. The whole response to that hurricane has been a big example of how private charity is more effective than state.
@@RobertHouse-m9h Go troll somewhere else, I said my arguments and didnt attack you, while you attacked me without saying any arguments, only insults. Het a Life better than trolling in internet tbh
The problem with "just building roads" is the land and planning permission. There is zero chance anyone could privately build a road in the UK. Also this video doesn't really address the complexity of charging for usage (toll roads etc)
Private investors can build roads... but but (yes I have a lots of buts but hear me out) 1. They can't expropriate the owner/s of the land upon which the road is built. This means that an individual owner who has a land in an opportune location could either elevate the price of the land or force the investor to build around him. If the road is long that would increase the costs of the investment and force the road to be build in an unoptimal manner increasing the transportation costs for the road users. 2. Building a road is a large scale investment. This means that it is probable for natural monopolies to occur. Of course we can easily imagine that there would be multiple companies building roads but there would have to be a lot of those companies to exclude the possibility of price collusion. Two or three investors could just meet up and decide on the price. Perhaps there would be situations where building a second road from city A to city B would seem profitable because the owner of the first road elevates prices but if you actually build a road and engage in a competition with the first owner the price would fall to the level that would discourage the investment or just encourage price collusion. Finally competition between the owners is reversely proportional to the price of maintenance of the infrastructure. Two roads from point A to point B means twice the maintenance cost but also more opportunities for competition between the owners to occur.
Corporates won't build infra in remote locations, that is why govt is needed. In India only the govt telecom company BSNL gives service to remote mountain areas, otherwise those people would be neglected.
I see no feasible way there’s enough money or good will to make lasting roads in my state. The government barely holds it intact. We have communities that are several miles out in the middle of nowhere with under 100 residents, swampy terrain, and nothing of economic or cultural significance out there. The government has to build those roads so they do. Who would be held accountable if nobody made roads out there? No one. Nobody to make the bloody thing, nobody to upkeep it, and you can just kiss all travel goodbye. My state, Louisiana, is populous and poor, but before Huey Long’s roads, we were even more poor and isolated. The government can and has done good in spite of its many, many overreaches and failures.
It’s pretty obvious that watching China and East Asia’s climb into prosperity that governments paying for infrastructure development is generally a good for economic development. Often to makes areas profitable the infrastructure must be created at a loss first. See the California dam system for an example of this.
My region of South Louisiana used to be completely isolated because we had no paved roads and travel was only possible in a few months of the year. Now with roads, we are free to go wherever whenever.
Ah, TTD. Note that you get gifted a huge amount of money at the start of the game to start building your empire. Very realistic, if you think about it...
I've never heard of this game but I want it now. You always recommend cool things. I recently read the Self Esteem book you recommended a few videos ago. Very helpful. I also bought the Economics in One Lesson book, I will read that next.
1 If the companies build the roads, no new company will be allowed to exploit them. 2 If the companies build the roads, will even the public be allowed to use them?
I like that this video was honest about what to expect, without stealing from tax subjects, there might not be as many roads as there are today, and some might not be in as good of condition. I am very much okay with that.
If it can’t make someone money, it isn’t needed, this is an excellent philosophy on which to build society. Why does this philosophy exist? Because it makes someone money.
Okay TTD, do you have to buy the land you are building on? As the monopolist, are you charging EVERYBODY the same price to use your roads, or do YOU run over them for free? Do you face any competition for road construction? Do competitors play fair? How accurate are the geographic problems? Flooding? Ground instability? Insurance an option? I realise you've used a GAME to try an illustrate a point, I asking the questions Ancaps never seem to acknowledge
Well as someone who purchase land in the middle of nowhere to build a house and paid several companies connect power, electric, gas, sewage, water and omg I need to build a road. The answer is the individual with the capital to do it themselves or pay some to do it on their behalf.
I'm generally in favor of some government funded infrastructure, and I hate that I don't have a good rebuttal. I suppose one issue I have would be that a company would have a monopoly on the roads in a given area.
OMG how I loved that game. Haven't played OpenTTD in a while and I see some improved graphics. I always loved to LARP as Dagny Taggart and demolish mountains in the way of MY TRAINS
If those that live there need a road, they can build and maintain it. If they can't fund it we have these massive online fundraising sites where funds can be raised and they can budget the supplies and work based on what they get. Also in places with inept government people are already repairing roads with supplies they purchase.
A lot of people also forget about private charity and private advantage too, you could feasibly make a product or service for which does not intend to receive profit for its own reasons.
Anarcho-capitalists often fail to recognize that the formation of any structured, voluntary, and organized society inevitably results in the emergence of hierarchical structures, which may ultimately resemble the state they seek to abolish. At its core, the idea of a stateless society based on voluntary exchange presupposes that some form of governance-whether explicit or implicit-is required to resolve conflicts and enforce property rights. In practice, hierarchies of power and control are unavoidable, and without a central organizing institution, the principles of justice and arbitration become fragmented, leading to de facto power imbalances, monopolies, and the consolidation of control. Moreover, anarcho-capitalism’s ideal of private property as an institution is inseparable from the state’s enforcement mechanisms. The libertarian concept of private property, with its inherent right to exclusion and ownership, requires legal protection and enforcement, which can only be realistically guaranteed by a centralized, coercive institution-namely, the state. In the absence of a state apparatus, property rights devolve into mere possession, and the ability to secure or transfer property becomes dependent on force or voluntary agreements without enforceable legal backing. This presents a fundamental problem for the concept of a “society of voluntary exchange,” as such a society assumes the existence of stable and enforceable property rights. Without a supervening institution to safeguard private autonomy and ensure the sanctity of contracts, the foundation of a libertarian utopia becomes tenuous. In such a society, the potential for exploitation and the creation of coercive power structures outside the framework of the state becomes not just possible but probable. Further, from a scientific standpoint, the dynamics of human interaction and competition suggest that power asymmetries will inevitably emerge in any system where resources, whether physical or intellectual, are unevenly distributed. These disparities lead to coercive relationships, even in a self-proclaimed “voluntary” system. Power, once concentrated, has a tendency to perpetuate itself, often resulting in the creation of informal elites or new forms of hierarchy that replicate the very conditions anarcho-capitalists claim to oppose. Thus, while anarcho-capitalism presents an intriguing theoretical model, its practical application fails to account for the underlying social dynamics that give rise to hierarchies and the state. In the absence of a legitimate, centralized authority to enforce mutual agreements and protect individual rights, a stateless society runs the risk of devolving into a state of lawlessness, where the powerful can freely dominate the weak, and the core principles of autonomy and voluntary exchange are undermined.
Just as it's laughable watching a well-fed Marxist complain about the evils of a state that gives them opportunity while still choosing to live there, I also laugh at the die-hard individualists enjoying their private property while ignoring the fact that the whole concept of private property is a social construct that states enforce.
Anarcho-capitalists often fail to recognize that if the government wasn't there to 'oppress' them then the companies would do it. They also fail to understand just how much the government protects us from bad business practices.
Common law, the ability to sue in a court of law, a constitution, a bill of rights, and legal restriction against violation of those rights and/or being enslaved to someone else's rights, I believe, is what you are referring to. As far as how those come about, it needs to be discussed organically, ground up, itemized line by line to make any sense. Our ancient ancestors evolved from the ground up, tribally using barter, silver or wampum, from trade, and yes sometimes through battle, but not from the top down from institutions and theory. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize for her research on shared resources, or the commons. Her research of real life communities that already exist and function throughout the world disproved the idea that locally, ungoverned, shared resources would be destroyed over time, and demonstrated that users can effectively manage common resources without government or private control. In other words, I'm shifting the burden of proof back onto the statists because we have seen that only one thing, community, is the necessary fundamental requirement of the survival of an ungoverned society, and it can effectively manage its infrastructure, courts, etc, through a well-communicated common valuation of those entities. We are not autonomously self-serving, isolated creatures acting in a vacuum when we have properly identified common interests, and we can and have always formed our own agreed upon jurisdictions locally by taking advantage of common interests to serve at the next higher step of scale, just by valuing the communities we are most intimately familiar with. Baby steps... Now, with these minimal costs, it's still too early to jump to the massive inorganic conclusion, or the overall expense which is "statism." The burden of proof still remains on statism to explain why we need it at all if we have already had communities that managed and evolved on their own for millennia without it. Wars exist with and without it. Infrastructure exists with and without it. Laws exist with and without it. Lastly, there is no utopia being pitched, sold, or electioneered within anarcho-capitalism, it's only 1) what already exists in nature before us and some convenient medium of exchange commonly valued by the community: gold, silver, wampum, bitcoin, whatever works for them, and 2) a refusal to believe the statist utopia being sold. So either stop selling it, or itemize the bottom line of what it is you are selling, because for now, it's just voodoo dressed in a cap and gown.
@@clamato54 Nothing you just said works at any scale greater than a small area. Statism exists because its efficient, instead of everyone being involved in everything we can select (or elect) some to manage it aka government. There's a reason governments formed once population increased to a level greater than tribe
How does anything reach mass scale? Either widespread popularity of an organic creation, or one size fits all statist creation. Problems and solutions may come from both state or organic creation. Look at what you're using to type this. It's loaded with standardized parts that sprung from agreements between engineers, community, barely ever statist intervention.
The roads are there but how would they work? Does this mean every road will be a toll road, would it mean the same transport company would also make automobiles, how would they prevent people from using their roads? Or if it's a residential street, would it be home owners who own sections of the road, what if one owner wants to charge for their section of the road but another doesn't etc.?
I always laugh at who will build the roads. That is the first move toward Libertarianism for almost every Libertarian is when they see with their own eyes the constant disrepair of roads and constant endless fixing them in ways that don't last. It is exactly government handling of roads that moves most Libertarians to the Libertarian ideas. Government can't maintain a simple road costing me thousands in replacing suspensions early and you want me to believe they can fix big issues like poverty or healthcare. To quote Joe Biden C'Mon Man.
I mean... if you think a dirt path is good enough for a 32 ton truck with cargo to hurdle along at 75 miles per hour safely on... Hell lets go back to antiquity, those paths weren't even suitable for carriages and wagons which is why STATES built roads. Paths existed and people walked them, just dirt paths tramped down by feet. But highways did not exist before the state. That didn't happen in 10,000 years of human history and trade. It's almost as if we have run the experiments and you don't get roads without social organization or something!
@@colonel__klink7548And you think social organization requires the government? This is so funny to me, people in my country 30 years ago wondered if the private sector would be capable of feeding the populace. Turns out that where there is demand, there is supply. Shocker, isn't it?
@@baph0met Well... The problem with that circular argument is the "private sector" in a modern state is as TIK has pointed out... not private. Not for the reasons TIK has said. It's that there is no such thing as a truly free market, and there is no such thing as a truly free market actor. Take the USA, it out competes EVERYONE in food production full stop. However in our industry 40% of the farmers, the top producers receive subsidies from the US government to produce more. This amounts to a 5% price bonus for grain. That doesn't sound like much, but for organizations that already have a scale advantage against their competitors it's just devastating to the bottom 60%. This means that every year the process of small farms going bankrupt and selling to the big farm operation is accelerated. In other words... part of the process to create the greatest agricultural output in the entire world the US state got involved in rigging the economy in favor of accelerating the growth of scale. However the US government does not run these industries itself because the government's incentive is political gain. They rely on capitalists to run these industries because a capitalist leadership's incentives are financial gain. The subsidies also act to ensure that the capitalists can only financially gain by maximizing supply, not by driving prices up instead. It's a bit of clever statecraft. There's no such thing as "private industry" get that out of your head. Doesn't exist.
@@colonel__klink7548 First time I hear anyone say "circular argument" to the basic law of supply and demand. Lmao. Yes, the private sector gets mudded with state intervention which tramples on economical calculation leading to wasting of resources. I know. That's why I'm against state intervention. US government interferes with agriculture leading to over funding and under funding of sectors. Not to mention the crushing of competition, like you nicely described, where small farms are forced to sell to big farms due to horrible government regulations and subsides. I am well aware, my country's agriculture has been destroyed this way.
@@baph0met See... the reason why I didn't even address supply and demand is that it's cited in situations which are... lets be honest... Childish. I'm not trying to be insulting with that but it is. Ok lets use an example, there was a demand for cheap clothing in the year 790 just like there was a demand for cheap clothing in the year 1990. Why wasn't there an industry in the year 790 for cheap clothing but there was in 1990? 790 they made all the clothes themselves, the cost (in terms of labor hours) was far far far far far greater. Why wasn't this demand met by the market!? There was less state involvement in people's lives afterall GLOBALLY in the year 790! Is this a technology issue? No. Because even sewing machines and power tools aside it's still more efficient to have tailors working together at scale to produce generally sized clothes rather than clothes hand fitted like they were in 790. Clothes would be cheaper in 790 if someone just... made a factory. And we see from pen factories in the 1500s, well before machine technology that manufactories did pop up when conditions were met even without modern science! The problem with the argument of "if we just do absolutelly nothing the market will magically solve everything for us is... it's wrong and it doesn't follow the historical record. It's fact dude. Every single country that industrialized (ie achieved SCALE ) did so with direct state protectionism, involvement and support. Fact. Full stop, fact. Every country that is an industrial power today basically got there by being... China. Every country that thereafter drank the coolaid and decided to go unfettered free trade deindustrialized. Fact. The UK even started de industrializing when trade barriers with India were reduced and they started to lose textile mills. These are facts. We didn't have an industrial revolution before state support. We didn't have roads before state support. We had subsistance lifestyle before the state. That's fact. You can theorycraft all you want but we have 10,000 years of economic experiments proving ancaps wrong.
I just want to take a minute here and say I was very excited at the idea of a "Sowell City". I wanted to move there, but then I saw "Galt's Gulch" and then changed my mind. I'd like to purchase a one way bus ticket to Galt's Gulch, please, Mr.Transport Company Man.
This is similar to a theory known as 'The Railroad Problem', in which there is one system which is state controlled, and another free enterprise controlled.
I prefer Railroad Tycoon II but the principle is basically the same. Well explained. Cheers. [Edit] In Denmark I think we have more paved roads than anywhere else in Europe. We pay for those with our taxes (most often; there are a few private roads, my own incl.) and, though they are form a purely economical perspective a loss, they are of benefit to all: We can all go everywhere we want and fast, on well paved roads. We wouldn't wish to have it any other way.
The useful thing the government could do would be set some uniform standards for electronic transponders, and arrange standard easements for police and emergency responders. This would essentially be a uniform commercial code, except for road usage. And since everyone owns a smartphone, they could also require that toll rates are published electronically and that a traveller planning a trip can lock in a rate. Then you could have apps that route you based on your preference between time to travel and cost in tolls. That gets you complete private ownership of roads, incentives to fix the potholes, and if you do bring a smartphone you can be rerouted when better rates are offered. And it'd probably be far cheaper than paying gas taxes since they'd actually go to road owners, and not random government boondoggles.
All good and all until a small town in the middle of nowhere asks a competing foreign power to build a bridge in their town since your local company doesn't find it economically feasible to build one there. Then you're faced with a choice of having to "waste" resources to build that bridge in order to save face or make your country seem backwards in the eyes of the world. This BTW happened in real-life in the US with a town asking the Soviets for aid. Extrapolate that to its eventual conclusion and you will find your citizens turning to a foreign power to provide them with the services you failed to provide and eventually rebelling or seceding. The problem with the ancap utopia is the same one as utopian communism. They can only work in an isolated environment with everyone following a specific set of rules. And they both fail and crumble when faced with outside pressure, alternatives like a hybrid system and people just not following the rules or making up their own. I'm all for reducing government waste and regulations but to say that just giving corporations the power to do everything the government does isn't the solution. What happens when the biggest bus company buys all the other busing competitors? How do you solve the inevitable monopolization that happens with every industry. And large corps always end up creating their own bureaucratic apparatus that is just as stifling as the governments. In the end you're replacing elected nitwits with unelected ones.
You are both historically and economically illiterate, and don't understand how the absolute majority of the goods and services you are provided with, including the roads, were built by private companies. In the UK in particular the absolute majority of the roads was privately built and maintained during the peak of industrial revolution, with no central planners like you required.
@@kasimirfreeman I'm not advocating for central planning. And most roads being built today are done so via governments handing out bids to private companies. My criticism is to the idea that without government this process would somehow work without issue. Maybe if you had basic reading comprehension you'd understand.
Public libraries are inefficient and are being closed down across the UK right now with government. Space exploration is unviable at the moment because the technology simply isn't there yet. In the future it may be... But Musk is doing a fine job compared to Nasa.
You should also play Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic to test socialism. On my first playthrough there was a lot of food in a food factory and none in the supermarkets, lmao
Thing is, government is rarely building them either, at least not with the money they they take from us. Have you looked at the state some of the roads are in? What's more, here in germany, you have this fun little thing that when a road gets remade, and you own property on that road, you have to pay for it. And since it's a government project, it's always too expensive as well.
Where I grew up in the Stockport area, I lived down an unadopted road. It was just a potholed track. The local vet up the road used to organise a community bonfire in the road each November 5th, the ashes from which helped fill the potholes. No one really minded the holes and puddles but when some new houses were built further down the road the council decided without consultation to adopt the road and but a shiny new tarmac surface on it one Summer. I think rates went up as a result. Nov 5th came along and the Vet built his community bonfire.... Yep leaving a very large melted hole in the middle of the new tarmac. That was the end of the community bonfires. Some of us liked the old badly made road and the freedoms it gave you.
This is how the UK's canal and rail network came into being. BUT it required Parliament to grant permission to the private businesses to compulsorily acquire the land from the existing land owners. How in this computer game is permission, to excise and to pass through private sovereign territory obtained? Turn Pike toll roads in the UK could be built only because the state was representative of major landowners and not the general population. It rapidly became clear that to establish infrastructure the traditional right to freedom of the masses had to be suppressed by the interests of a few. The state is a symptom of the Pareto distribution.
PERFECT! The USA I believe built a bridge two decades ago somewhere in Alaska. The bridge wasn't used, didn't connect ANYTHING, so became known as "BRIDGE TO NOWHERE." Somebody in government "SAW A NEED." LMAO.
If some businessmen do build "roads to nowhere," they take on the risk and the loss. That happened, not infrequently in the nineteenth century and railroads. Here in Connecticut, there were a series of railroads built from small seaports inland to essentially nowhere that struggled until they were absorbed into larger railroads, some of which still struggled. But the risk was carried by the taxpayers, but by the businessmen.
Also, theres no need to put asphalt and drainage systems everywhere, people figure out whats actually needed. Outside my house i have clay road, in the nearby capitol of the department (similar to state you could say, im in southamerica) there are even some pure dirt roads. Sure, in the few cases when it rains then well the clay road here is still okayish, the dirtroads however... well, you can drive them in a car, walking them or motorbike might be less feasable but its to rare to rain to invest on that, you can use different routes, motorbikes can drive on the sidewalk where there is one...
I think this argument is not good enough. I get your point but, if the road is a property of someone, who is going to allow the road to be used freely by everybody? The bus company president (in this case) could decide to close the road and block the economy every time he is not happy about something and no one can actually complain. Also, we are using the mentality of "developed" countries. But history clearly shows that most of the time the Government is necessary to start new projects, that no investor would risk on it. Basic example: who would have ever thought of building the Shinkansen line from Tokyo to Osaka? No private citizen or company would have EVER invested a dime into it, because it is such a huge amount of money that literally no one can afford it. But guess what! That project was a project that caused an economic boom in the country and allowed the start of the famous Japanese economic miracle. Yes, nowadays private companies may want to build such huge projects because there is a track record of successes, but no one would have ever STARTED it. Personally I don't like the Government meddling with the economy and various projects (see the disastrous HS2 project): however, the Government SOMETIMES is definitely necessary.
I assume this exists in other countries too but here in Japan there are towns in the countryside where you pay almost no property taxes, as a result the government doesn't come out to collect litter, cut weeds or do any of that maintenance. But locals do it themselves, Everyone has to pitch in and take a turn doing a couple of hours work every few months and as a result you save thousands in taxes and get a better result.
Sure, but like... what about unprofitable roads? Like the purpose of muncipal infrastructure isn't to connect the factories to the ports. Theres lots of extremely rural and unprofitable roads required ro make modern life function
In NJ i lived on a street which the city owns, but it was capped by two county roads, and semi circled by a state highway (rt 4). The street is a steep slope and lots of storms, drainage, issues arise, and it always requires the public utilities who need to get involved. And instead of traffic flaggers protecting workers there are local and county cop cars blocking the street to non resident traffic. That is why taxes in NJ are stupid high, because every official, worker, cop, inspector has a govt salary with govt benefits
Infrastructure is not all about profit and efficiency. Sometimes its ok to dump some money to make it able for people in shitholes to still reach a city. You can't just make everything profit and efficiency driven that can't be healthy for a society...
@@htrainman4178 i wish it was that simple. There is a reason why we need laws. Otherwise companies could do literally anything to get profits even if it is to the detriment of others. Im not an advocate for total government control but no regulation is also a wrong way. Yes Government is inefficient but only doing something because its efficient and profitable creates bad incentives...
Private neighborhoods build their own roads all the time in America. Theres an entire private, very wealthy gated community outside Orlando with its own stores, gas stations, is policed by private security, and has a major contract with the county fire department. It is essentially a private city. The answer to "who will build the roads" is quite simple. The people who live there. The only possible argument you can make towards government building roads is interstates for national defense, and for very, very rural areas with huge farms making up the majority of the population, or national parks. In which case you do not need sprawling 6 lane roads, you need roads just big enough to handle the expected use, being farm vehicles, tanks, and emergency vehicles.
I might also point out that the vast majority of new roadways is already built by developers, not state agencies. When it comes to roads between towns, we already have those, and have had them for centuries.
Problem is that sometimes the return on investment is not very good. So companies will not do it and the nation will not develop, unless the government takes the risk for the companies. I.e. build harbour or rail facilities so transportation of goods is better and thus it drives growth. Not everything needs to be on the extreme ends as black and white, sometimes you gotta meet in the middle.
Some Questions: Can prices of affordable bus tickets make up for the construction of a road? Will there be any sidewalks if the bus company is the road constructor? The privatisation of roads would lead to car toll stations everywhere. Would that be a efficient use of labor?
Yes but who will build roads wide enough for tank divisions?
The military...
build tank that can go on road
@@Litany_of_Furybut why tanks? wheeled transport can better use the existing road infrastructure and minimize wear and tears. Thus retaining the ability for profit.
Tanks don't have to have roads. Just don't be a dumbass and try to drive it over a mountain, through a forest or a lake and you're good.
this is actually a very very smart comment
"But who’s gonna build the potholes?"😂
what is a po-tho-les? is this greek?
@@neonschaf wouldn't that be hilarious? Potholes, the Ancient Greek that was so terrible at building roads, they named "pot holes" after him🤣
Pothole. It sounds like a hole in the ground used for smoking funny stuff.
@@FranzAntonMesmer That was a fine approach to that problem, and I'm glad it worked well. Thanks for the input.
They build themselves if there is a demand.
Wasn't there a thing a few years ago where a guy built a road in the UK because the "official" road was under years of "repair". He built a road, put up a box to charge tolls and completely ignored the people who refused to pay (ie, he didn't care if people using it refused to pay). Eventually, the govt road got fixed and people stopped using his road. At the end of the day, he didn't make much money but he also didn't lose any.
Did he have a loisense for at?
There was a government that said it would cost $65,000 to build some steps. A guy decided to make the steps for $550, but the government came and tore it down. edition.cnn.com/2017/07/20/americas/man-steps-trouble-trnd/index.html
The new government steps cost $10,000 (supposedly) www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tom-riley-park-stairs-rebuilt-1.4227365
In 2014, English businessman Mike Watts of Kelston, Somerset - Faced with months of roadworks and a 22km diversion around a busy commuter route, rented a nearby field - and became the first private individual in Britain to build a toll road in more than a century. Watts spent £150 000 building the unofficial road next to the A431, where a small section had been cordoned off.
@@TheImperatorKnight yeah but they meet all the health and safety regs, and the committee to decide the name of the project, and the other committee to decide how it effects the disenfranchised needed to be paid at least a couple grand each.
Everyone knows you can't pave a road without a local politician actually mixing the asphalt themselves because they are the ones that own the local paving company and award all the contracts to themselves
I mean, you chose them so that's what you want. You cant really be full on liberterian/Anarcho-capitalist and expect others to be responsible for you. You are on your own.
If you dont like them just vote them out. If you cant outfight a monopolic corporation in a political struggle. Tough shit.
@@scrawnydaghost yep, magic politician asphalt. This is very well known.
@@gupler So I have to validate an oppressive system by voting in a two party oligarchy or I lose the right to complain that the two party oligarchy is oppressing me? Make it make sense.
I remember an economist mocking the notion of "who will build the roads?" He said, at one place we have someone who built an amazing complex factory, in another place we have someone who built an amazing complex shopping center...and the two are just gonna look at each other and be stumped as to what do next? Anyone capable of building a factory, or store, or subdivision is going to find the task of road building ridiculously simple.
That's stepping past all the middle ground... Nobody is building that factory without access to labor, water and raw materials. Guess what that requires as the pre-requisite? Oh... the road... The shopping mall wouldn't exist without access to the sheer scale of population to make it worthwhile as well as the large volume of warehouses needed to supply it, which means again... the road. Not a dirt path, a road that in ancient times was suitable for carriages and wagons or today supports a 32 ton vehicle traveling at 75 miles per hour safely.
So you won't even have the investment in the factory without adequate investment in infrastructure in the first place! In an industrial economy (that can only exist AFTER roads as mentioned) the cost is minimal. However in a low output pre industrial society you need to pool the resources of a lot more people in order to build the road. So either you need a full anarchist view of everyone agreeing, and this would be getting ten thousand people to agree, or you need someone who merely owns all the land everyone is working on and he gives everyone no choice but to work on his road project or be evicted from his property. AKA... Feudalism.
Then you consider the point of an investment in capital be it a factory or a road from a capitalism perspective is to rake in as much money as possible as quickly as possible. Not to generate income for future generations but to make money NOW. So the person who builds that toll road is incentivized to charge as much as people can possibly pay to use it. He will keep upping the rates on the road until people stop using it and then back off. This will maximize his profits off the project and benefit him now. This means that the road is so expensive to use that say... Supplying a theoretical factory with it is no longer worthwhile because transportation is now 90% of the price of goods (as it was for 99% of human history.) The man who owns the road has no incentive to reduce the price for a theoretical return on a theoretical increase of traffic from a factory that may or may not be developed to take advantage of the lower price. There's no guarentee that such a thing will happen and in fact in his current environment (99% of human history) there's no evidence any such thing would ever happen so he won't relent on the price.
Further he has no experience in factories or mass production himself so he won't be using capital from his roads to invest in a factory on his own road. That's not how it works. It's similar to communists saying the American industrial revolution came because of slavery ignoring the fact that all the proceeds from slavery went to buying more land and more slaves. It's the same thing.
In other words the economist you were listening to was a Chicago school formulae idiot. We've followed the Chicago school since the 1980s and by 2008 we got so poor enough people couldn't afford houses that it crashed the entire global economy.
@@colonel__klink7548So roads can't be built without roads? One has to wonder if the first meter of the so called "road" was a gift from aliens. Or perhaps Jesus created the first road as a blessing upon our world.
@@colonel__klink7548 Have you not defeated your own argument? If building a new road is a prerequisite to building a shopping centre, then it will be a part of the investment cost. Also 10,000 people can agree to pool together resources to do something, it’s called investing. One does this mysterious and arcane form of action usually in a place called a ‘Stock Market’. Also on your point that there is no guarantee that prices will fall if the cost of using the road falls, the counter is this: There is no guarantee that anything will happen, there are incentives that push people to make decisions but the deciding is up to the individual. The road builder is incentivised, heavily may I add, to set the ‘market price’ as his price as that will ensure the greatest amount of profit. Also the claim that Capitalism is all about short term profit is utter nonsense. It is precisely the opposite, Socialism is the system that cares about short term profit the most. It’s literally in the name, CAPITAL, which requires savings, i.e thinking long term. Capitalism is much more far sighted since one must save and plan to acquire capital. Socialism is very short sighted since it encourages theft. One sees the headline profits but never the countless years worth of work that were done to achieve it.
@@colonel__klink7548 You believe we've followed the Chicago school since the 1980s, the idiot is you.
@@colonel__klink7548 Wow! That was a massively long reply which said absolutely nothing! The simplest answer is that if there is a demand for something to be done, it will be done. It is as simple as that.
I live in rural Canada. They "fix" the roads every fall, just in time for the winter to wreck them again. There's about a month without potholes. Everyone has a tractor, we could fix them ourselves very easily but someone needs that fat government contract.
And no doubt you'd all make a damn better job too 😉
You literally could fix them yourself. Do you think the government would stop you? Go and fix them.
@jrton1366 Yes. In many places, people have tried to fix roads they were stopped by thier governments.
@@jrton1366 It's even a legal offence to clean/brush dirty trafic signs in Germany....
I'm forced to wonder if these leeching companies also practice poor workmanship. I live in the northern USA and as a child potholes were very common. In the past decade however, many of my town's roads have been resurfaced and...no potholes have appeared. Potholes are primarily caused by frost heaving, so I assume whichever company constructed the most recent roads did a quality job leveling and draining the roadways. Or at least, it seems like potholes are not as inevitable as I had once assumed.
Which is EXACTLY how railroads were built. Private companies looking to make a profit, built railroads to connect markets so they could ship goods from one market to another.
I'll 1up you: The city of Brunswick, which had the first trainstation in Germany (it was later torn down and thus people don't count it as such anymore), had a circle of heavy and high tech industry for its time surrounding the inner city. Those companies then laid an extension to the failway that encircled the city so that they could bring resources and goods right to their companies' doorsteps. That track is today mainly a city-encircling park between the inner and outer city.
Correct ✅ 💯 the government has become a cartel, skimming off the top to feed more government, and actually suppressing the very same road building that they were voted in to do 🤦♂️
They're building a sidewalk on the main road by my apartment, they estimated 2 years, to build about 1 mile of sidewalk, 2 miles if you count both sides. Keeping in mind "2 years" in Houston construction language is typically closer to 5 years. Not the most glaring endorsement of publicly funded roadways.
Construction is paid by the hour, not by the project.
Not kidding.
That's the reason. Everywhere on the planet where this complaint is true.
Oh how H9uston has fallen. I still live there but in a suburb. I remember how construction worked as a kid to what you say now and I'm so sad. The reason we knew about it, besides seeing it ourselves, was bc there were news stories and articles about how places all over the world were copying how we designed and built our roads. When a bid was out out it had a time table built in. There were de a dlines for phases and completion. There was a stash of "weather days" that could be applied and a way to petition for more the weather was just that bad that year. Companies had to be on time or once they got too late there were penalties. If the got done early they got bonuses. But there was also strict inspections so no corner cutting. It's not hard to create a good incentive structure for a timely project. Apparently they just don't care anymore. And from the costs I see, it's not bc they can do it cheaper this way. People really need to figure out who is profiting, this reeks of corruption.
Here in the US early in our development a lot of roads were built by companies or private citizens, they were typically toll roads. So yeah, this is definitely a thing.
I remember being in NY state, all the highways are toll roads. Made my blood boil. Here in Texas we have toll roads, but we also have freeways, key word "free" way. Because the whole point of a toll road is that you're paying to get there faster, because there's less traffic. Making every highway a toll road is just an extra tax, on the roads we already paid for.
They were most often known as Plank Roads since they were made of planks....or rather rather large ties similar to the ones railroads use but much longer.
Nearly all wagon trails were "built" by people using them, thereby creating a trail. Some of the well traveled ones, once the west started to get established, were improved and modified by the stage coach companies or private interest. Usually a collective group of business leaders Village Fathers from area communities for just the purpose TiK expressed. They had a financial incentive to expand the their cities by making more reliable connections between them.
Now they are selling off public assets (highways, bridges,parking) to private equity firms... some kind of messed up full circle I guess...
In the storm ravaged mountains of North Carolina, the town of Chimney Rock was cut off and likely would be for months if not a year or more. The state DOT said they'd send surveyors and engineers as did the Army Corps of Engineers. No one came. But a half dozen mineworker guys from West Virginia came down, lived in tents for near three weeks and build a road opening up the area. The locals call them "The West Virginia Boys". Can's say if the petty bureaucrats will take revenge on the men, but if they do, I'd advise bureaucrats avoid going in the mountains of North Carolina for a decade or so.
A good description of how the township government develops to provide roads, etc. is given in 'Civil Government in the United States' (1902), John Fiske He also discusses the origins of the township from Greece through England.
It's a muddy track for residents, not exactly the thing TIK was talking about. But necessary in the circumstances.
@@gbcb8853 What do you think a road has been for near the entirety of human civilization and even now? It is called a dirt road, a road does not need asphalt and neon lights to be a road, HIGH traffic HIGH wear roads are the ones that receive gravel, brick, cement, or asphalt treatment normally but do not hold monopoly on the term "road" in any reality.
If not for the government, who will build overpriced pothole-ridden roads? We can't have free market efficiency in such important infrastructure.
False. Walter Block already written on this
^ False, and vacuous 😂 .
In reality the government is to blame for the pish poor state of the roads, both in the UK and basically all other countries with bad roads.
I wouldn't mind paying a toll to use a private road. Will save me from having to replace bushings, shocks and struts and tires on my car due to potholes.
It was raining and I didn't see one of the potholes, so drove into it. The BANG shook me up. Couldn't have been good for the car.
Coming from Sydney Australia, I completely disagree with your statement.
Then again, the tolled roads in Sydney have a shit load of Government intervention involved, so not really private.
Don't worry, you can go to Italy, pay hundreds and hundreds in tolls and, because the motorway is a natural monopoly, the company will start neglecting maintenance.
That's how Genova bridge and other bridges starting crumbling into pieces.
Obviously these people are too rich to actually go to prison.
@@jossdeibossyeah , but I imagine the reason it is a monopoly and still is, because of government intervention, probably with zoning laws, tax cuts, and bail outs. There would be no such thing as a monopoly In a free market
@@DrHavoc49 There would be. How many highways are you going to build in parallel?
There was small community in rural Brazil that had to rebuild their old bridge after it fell down due to heavy rain. The government estimated it would cost 4 million dollars and a few years to rebuild it, the community did it with a quarter million dollars in a few months.
A lot of people said it wouldn't last the first rain. Rio Grande do Sul, their state, had one of the worst rains in their history in the beginning of this year but the bridge still stands.
"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see."
I love this type of content. It amazes me how obvious this all should be yet, people simply can’t get their minds around anyone other than the government doing things for them. Keep up the great work!
When people come together and decide change and want to be part of the change it happens, look at the States now🎉
Who will do this if the government has monopoly?
That roads "game" essentially recreates the building of the railway network in Britain. Private railway companies saw opportunities for profit by building routes between major towns and linking the industrial centres. They had wealthy backers, investors and shareholders, who bought up land along the routes. And then the rail companies added to their profits by building houses alongside the tracks and even created new towns in the countryside where the wealthier townspeople could move to, to escape the noise, dirt and overcrowding of the bigger towns and then commute to their jobs on the trains. Some lines extrnttded to the coast and opened this up to more town dwellers to take a day trip to enjoy the fresh sea air, which in turn drove the expansion of coastal towns into holiday resorts, many of which were previously small fishing communities, bringing increased wealth to those areas .
Actually, it also serves the model of the canal network. Canals were out-competed by rail, just as rail was out-competed by road. However rail was undone precisely because roads were/are funded from general taxation. Road pricing is the way of the future.
Those train firms were corporations. Corporations are legal entities encoded under government enforced law. WIthout government, these corporations and their ability to have limited liability, in order to sell shares to public buyers (ie. share holders), would simply not be able to do that. There's no reason to sell shares without limited liability - a firms sells shares so that it can get additional money that it needs, but then it has to promise returns to those holders. If it also had to be fully liable for the full value of the company, then the cost outweighs the benefit. This is because firms are run by humans, and humans aren't masochistic about improving their earnings, unless they can get something extra out of it (ie. the whole profit incentive again). That's the reason shares of ownership were first invented as a financial instrument in the Netherlands c. 17th century. The boat merchants didn't want to risk their whole boat on a trading voyage, so they divvied up the ownership with their friends in exchange for shared returns.
So much paper can get torn up if it's unenforced by an objective (to the best of it's ability, anyway; usually that's why there's laws to help them practice jurisprudence) third party. Do you think people like complicated paper work? They'd tear it up, because it's just a piece of paper, and they'd think they were getting scammed. Unenforced, it's easy for a lot of scammers to get involved anyway.
This is why in the game Eve Online, no one buys shares in any corporations, *even though that's a vanilla feature of the game* . They don't buy the shares, because there's just too many scammers out there who promise returns to the owners, then take the money and run. The space police in the game (it's a game about spaceships btw), are not there to enforce contracts, only to perform basic peace keeping in high security zones. The collateral mechanic for contracts works fine though, but contracts have to remain very basic like "transport this item here".
@@gbcb8853 On the other hand, government subsidies can fire up an economy faster and allow countries to be first in doing something. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it gives them propagandistic bragging rights a lot of the time
@@Usammityduzntafraidofanythin there's no "firing up" it just redistributes what one group of people has to the other. the government action didn't create anything that couldn't be possible voluntarily.
What happens when the person who owns the road says "this is my private property, and I don't like you, so you can't use this road. The one in front of your house/business"?
One man cannot build a road alone. Lets not forget that the government can do the same thing
Use a different road, if that doesn't exist, build your own or show entrepreneurs that there is demand for more roads, if that doesn't work talk to the owner, ask him why he doesn't want to do business with you. Ultimately, it's unprofitable to exclude paying customers from buying your product, thus this scenario is unlikely to happen in the first place.
@@benshiotsu8553 yes, but that’s public vs private property. Do they really own the road if they can’t control it?
Maybe if that’s a sacrifice they are willing to make in creating a road, giving up some rights to it, but then you have the free rider problem.
@@Destroyer11204 have you heard of what lead to Killdoser? It was exactly that: a business working with the city to basically ruin a man’s livelihood by owning the land one needs to cross to use his property and denying it to him.
Talking doesn’t always work because people aren’t always rational, let alone correct. And even then, sometimes it is within your best interests to remove someone from the board.
@@Destroyer11204As if humans are only driven by rationality. If another human being dislikes you enough, chances are they'll find a way to screw with you even if it is unprofitable for them.
Hey TIK, Just wanted to say I really enjoy your content and I'm starting to look more into your books you recommend and the ideas you say. I appreciate your hard work in sourcing and telling it as it is, thanks for everything! Your friend - E.
TIK, idk about using a video game to prove your point, because in video games (generally) central planning works better due to:
1) player literally knows the future
2) player is generally competent and omniscient
3) it's hard to create competent AIs to simulate mass scale decision making
also road is very cheep
compare cost of a road vs bus in OpenTTD
and then in real life
It's not an accurate simulation. My point of using the game was to explain the principle.
Hurry Rothbard... Good name
And I don't think Ron Haul is a coincidence either
people that think the government build roads have a lot of explaining to do regarding the countless individuals who literally moved mountains to create a safer shortcut from one village to another, oftentimes without any kind of finacial incentive, but merely to make things easier for themselves, and others in the process
You described a scenario in which you have a secure monopoly. If you do not have a monopoly, once you build the roads, a competiton would emerge, which will use your roads and you would be on the losing side (your competiton would not have to come up with the costs of roads).
And if you somehow charge for the roads, this is ta least a local monopoly scenario, not exactly free market.
Thing is, here in the US, this is exactly how the original roads were built. And yes, they DID get built - often in patchwork and inefficient fashion because different companies had different priorities in different areas. We had plenty of private tollways and turnpikes but they often only serviced regional concerns because that was where the money was.
Government didn't need to build ALL the roads, but it needed to build SOME in order to coordinate things, as well as to build the National Highway System.
I haye a post on X that shows this is how most UK roads were built historically before being seized by the state. I can provide you the PDF of the historical study that contained maps and statistics on the builders. This video could have used 2-3 more minutes of referencing that forgotten history. Love the use of OpenTTD to make a point. Well done!
I'm a big advocate for TTD.
...Wait, what's Transport Tycoon?
This question got answered definitively this week, Dominoes pizza started paying to fill in potholes in some towns where the government was refusing to
I laughed. I cried. I laughed again.
10/10, best film ever!
-An Economist
As a village folk i have something to add, if lets say roads are built entirely by business I dont think there would be much incentive for companies to build roads there despite it being profitable in total. Why? Well for transport companies it would be a low priority as villages give smaller margins and would require more infrastructure for less people. And for companies who take in these villagers its unlikely theyd see enough of a profit individually to justify the cost of a road, the populace of a village is gonna work in dozens of different businesses so even if the villagers make enough profit in total to justify a road a few times over not any company has enough share of this profit to justify building one. What do you think?
Then the villagers will move or build a road themselves. That's like asking "but who will build me a tram line if I decide to live in the Himalayas?" If you want roads you move somewhere where there are roads or you build them yourself/pay someone to do it for you.
Yes the lower profit margins indicate less importance and that resources could be better utilised elsewhere. This is not really a problem but just being efficient with scarce resources. Also the villagers can pool their resources together. This is usually called investing or buying shares. Several villagers can contribute and thus get portions of the profit from tolls.
You pay taxes to build the roads anyways so i dont know whats different
For ancaps it really doesn't matter whether the government builds them or not. The ideological comittment to a non-government society is honestly sad sometimes. Free people can do whatever they want, including volunteering to live on land subject to a state by contract, and thus paying taxes.
I can't believe someone as intelligent as you can have such a simplistic view of these issues. There are a ton of situations in which building a road is not economically profitable, but necessary due to social issues (transporting elder people in a rural area to the hospital...or would you let them rot and die cos it isn't economically profitable?), environmental issues (a road to give forestry firefighters access to forestry fires before they become a maestrom out of control that destroys entire towns), cultural issues (a road to show the people some part of their history, like an excavation in the middle of nowhere)....I could spend a week writing examples.
I guess when you were younger you embraced the left too much, got dissapointed and then went to the other extreme, embracing it, yet again, too much.
Life is not about what is profitable or efficient. Culture, Art, Education and long list of important things in life aren't. Our own planet is not profitable or efficient. Our own existence, as humans, is not profitable or efficient.
Should profits and efficiency be considered in any project? Of course. Should those things being the only consideration? No fucking way. Taking care of my old and sick parents is not profitable or efficient for me (I'd inherit money - profit -if I let them die, I'd save a lot of time taking care of them if I let them die), but I do it with all my heart, cos I'm human, not a fucking Excel table.
One question is why should the elderly continue to live and parasitize as they do now under the state?
@@oalalv_raoaov I don't know which kind of elder people you know, but my parents and most of the elders I know are not parasites, they worked hard during most of their lives, so they do deserve we take care of them, the same way they took care of us when we were kids. That applies everywhere in the world. It's sick that someone can think of our elders like parasites.
In my case, being Spanish, I can tell you that their generation is the best generation my country has had in centuries, much better than mine and much better than my daughter's. They not only worked hard in their proffessional lives to make our country a good place to live, but they also did their very best to give their children the greatest chances to grow into good adults. And they also fought to recover the freedom we lost in the Spanish Civil War. You don't see that level of sacrficie anymore in this individualistic world...
I feel sorry for you thinking about your elders in that way. Anyway, in a few decades, when you are an elder yourself, you'll answer your own question all by yourself.
Private charity exists. Just recently after the flooding in NC there was community cut off. State officials said it would take maybe a year to rebuild the road to them. WV boys came and rebuilt the road in a month, out of the goodness of their hearts. The whole response to that hurricane has been a big example of how private charity is more effective than state.
"Our own existence, as humans, is not profitable or efficient."
Your entire comment is nothing but moralistic blather based on false premises.
@@RobertHouse-m9h Go troll somewhere else, I said my arguments and didnt attack you, while you attacked me without saying any arguments, only insults. Het a Life better than trolling in internet tbh
It was always funny to me that Transport Tycoon games are one of the only games that have managed to simulate anarcho-capitalism lol
The problem with "just building roads" is the land and planning permission. There is zero chance anyone could privately build a road in the UK. Also this video doesn't really address the complexity of charging for usage (toll roads etc)
Private investors can build roads... but but (yes I have a lots of buts but hear me out)
1. They can't expropriate the owner/s of the land upon which the road is built. This means that an individual owner who has a land in an opportune location could either elevate the price of the land or force the investor to build around him. If the road is long that would increase the costs of the investment and force the road to be build in an unoptimal manner increasing the transportation costs for the road users.
2. Building a road is a large scale investment. This means that it is probable for natural monopolies to occur. Of course we can easily imagine that there would be multiple companies building roads but there would have to be a lot of those companies to exclude the possibility of price collusion. Two or three investors could just meet up and decide on the price. Perhaps there would be situations where building a second road from city A to city B would seem profitable because the owner of the first road elevates prices but if you actually build a road and engage in a competition with the first owner the price would fall to the level that would discourage the investment or just encourage price collusion.
Finally competition between the owners is reversely proportional to the price of maintenance of the infrastructure. Two roads from point A to point B means twice the maintenance cost but also more opportunities for competition between the owners to occur.
Oh also rural towns with no giant industry get gravel roads at best under a private system.
I think you're missing the concept of positive externalities
Corporates won't build infra in remote locations, that is why govt is needed. In India only the govt telecom company BSNL gives service to remote mountain areas, otherwise those people would be neglected.
I see no feasible way there’s enough money or good will to make lasting roads in my state. The government barely holds it intact. We have communities that are several miles out in the middle of nowhere with under 100 residents, swampy terrain, and nothing of economic or cultural significance out there. The government has to build those roads so they do. Who would be held accountable if nobody made roads out there? No one. Nobody to make the bloody thing, nobody to upkeep it, and you can just kiss all travel goodbye. My state, Louisiana, is populous and poor, but before Huey Long’s roads, we were even more poor and isolated. The government can and has done good in spite of its many, many overreaches and failures.
worked out great in america :) no trains just a gigantic car lobby which is ruining the planet
also leading to suburban sprawl, which is literally the worst thing in the world.
It’s pretty obvious that watching China and East Asia’s climb into prosperity that governments paying for infrastructure development is generally a good for economic development.
Often to makes areas profitable the infrastructure must be created at a loss first. See the California dam system for an example of this.
My region of South Louisiana used to be completely isolated because we had no paved roads and travel was only possible in a few months of the year. Now with roads, we are free to go wherever whenever.
i dont agree with these ideas. but damn i love your videos. keep at it. =)
The people literally build the roads. Government doesn’t create anything.
The government is made of people, funded by people, and funds the roads. This is libertarian brain rot.
In Wales this was the background to the Rebecca Riots, leading to the abolition of tolls.
Ah, TTD. Note that you get gifted a huge amount of money at the start of the game to start building your empire. Very realistic, if you think about it...
I've never heard of this game but I want it now. You always recommend cool things. I recently read the Self Esteem book you recommended a few videos ago. Very helpful. I also bought the Economics in One Lesson book, I will read that next.
OpenTTD is a great game, highly recommended, especially if you like trains. It's basically a game for people who like making train lines.
Who will pay for the potholes?
Most people think that having the government paying for the potholes means that they are not paying for the potholes.
1 If the companies build the roads, no new company will be allowed to exploit them.
2 If the companies build the roads, will even the public be allowed to use them?
This channel is like a course at the Ron Paul Institute.
How are you not one of his lecturers yet?
Wasn't expecting an OpenTTD cameo on the channel but here we are, who says you cant learn anything from video games.
F.. now TIKhistory is feeding my gaming addiction!
People complaining about road monopolies fail to consider that I can just buy a drone and attach it to a backpack and just fly to work.
I like that this video was honest about what to expect, without stealing from tax subjects, there might not be as many roads as there are today, and some might not be in as good of condition. I am very much okay with that.
If it can’t make someone money, it isn’t needed, this is an excellent philosophy on which to build society. Why does this philosophy exist? Because it makes someone money.
Okay TTD, do you have to buy the land you are building on?
As the monopolist, are you charging EVERYBODY the same price to use your roads, or do YOU run over them for free?
Do you face any competition for road construction? Do competitors play fair?
How accurate are the geographic problems? Flooding? Ground instability? Insurance an option?
I realise you've used a GAME to try an illustrate a point, I asking the questions Ancaps never seem to acknowledge
Well as someone who purchase land in the middle of nowhere to build a house and paid several companies connect power, electric, gas, sewage, water and omg I need to build a road. The answer is the individual with the capital to do it themselves or pay some to do it on their behalf.
I love this game! Congrats TiK your channel is amazing! I hope you can keep going!
How do malls get built who will pay for the air conditioning and the carpark
The answer is the same for roads
Tik has really gone down the lolbertarian dead end
Not a libertarian.
The government didn’t build the railroads, railroad companies did. No different
Last time such ideas didn't ended very well.
Of course, it'll be interesting to try it again in some far away country.
I'm generally in favor of some government funded infrastructure, and I hate that I don't have a good rebuttal.
I suppose one issue I have would be that a company would have a monopoly on the roads in a given area.
Never thought I would be seeing a TIKhistory video on OpenTTD
OMG how I loved that game. Haven't played OpenTTD in a while and I see some improved graphics. I always loved to LARP as Dagny Taggart and demolish mountains in the way of MY TRAINS
Btw theres a whole 300 page book written by walter block just talking about roads called "the privatization of roads and highways"
If those that live there need a road, they can build and maintain it. If they can't fund it we have these massive online fundraising sites where funds can be raised and they can budget the supplies and work based on what they get.
Also in places with inept government people are already repairing roads with supplies they purchase.
A lot of people also forget about private charity and private advantage too, you could feasibly make a product or service for which does not intend to receive profit for its own reasons.
Anarcho-capitalists often fail to recognize that the formation of any structured, voluntary, and organized society inevitably results in the emergence of hierarchical structures, which may ultimately resemble the state they seek to abolish. At its core, the idea of a stateless society based on voluntary exchange presupposes that some form of governance-whether explicit or implicit-is required to resolve conflicts and enforce property rights. In practice, hierarchies of power and control are unavoidable, and without a central organizing institution, the principles of justice and arbitration become fragmented, leading to de facto power imbalances, monopolies, and the consolidation of control.
Moreover, anarcho-capitalism’s ideal of private property as an institution is inseparable from the state’s enforcement mechanisms. The libertarian concept of private property, with its inherent right to exclusion and ownership, requires legal protection and enforcement, which can only be realistically guaranteed by a centralized, coercive institution-namely, the state. In the absence of a state apparatus, property rights devolve into mere possession, and the ability to secure or transfer property becomes dependent on force or voluntary agreements without enforceable legal backing.
This presents a fundamental problem for the concept of a “society of voluntary exchange,” as such a society assumes the existence of stable and enforceable property rights. Without a supervening institution to safeguard private autonomy and ensure the sanctity of contracts, the foundation of a libertarian utopia becomes tenuous. In such a society, the potential for exploitation and the creation of coercive power structures outside the framework of the state becomes not just possible but probable.
Further, from a scientific standpoint, the dynamics of human interaction and competition suggest that power asymmetries will inevitably emerge in any system where resources, whether physical or intellectual, are unevenly distributed. These disparities lead to coercive relationships, even in a self-proclaimed “voluntary” system. Power, once concentrated, has a tendency to perpetuate itself, often resulting in the creation of informal elites or new forms of hierarchy that replicate the very conditions anarcho-capitalists claim to oppose.
Thus, while anarcho-capitalism presents an intriguing theoretical model, its practical application fails to account for the underlying social dynamics that give rise to hierarchies and the state. In the absence of a legitimate, centralized authority to enforce mutual agreements and protect individual rights, a stateless society runs the risk of devolving into a state of lawlessness, where the powerful can freely dominate the weak, and the core principles of autonomy and voluntary exchange are undermined.
Just as it's laughable watching a well-fed Marxist complain about the evils of a state that gives them opportunity while still choosing to live there, I also laugh at the die-hard individualists enjoying their private property while ignoring the fact that the whole concept of private property is a social construct that states enforce.
Anarcho-capitalists often fail to recognize that if the government wasn't there to 'oppress' them then the companies would do it. They also fail to understand just how much the government protects us from bad business practices.
Common law, the ability to sue in a court of law, a constitution, a bill of rights, and legal restriction against violation of those rights and/or being enslaved to someone else's rights, I believe, is what you are referring to.
As far as how those come about, it needs to be discussed organically, ground up, itemized line by line to make any sense. Our ancient ancestors evolved from the ground up, tribally using barter, silver or wampum, from trade, and yes sometimes through battle, but not from the top down from institutions and theory.
Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize for her research on shared resources, or the commons. Her research of real life communities that already exist and function throughout the world disproved the idea that locally, ungoverned, shared resources would be destroyed over time, and demonstrated that users can effectively manage common resources without government or private control. In other words, I'm shifting the burden of proof back onto the statists because we have seen that only one thing, community, is the necessary fundamental requirement of the survival of an ungoverned society, and it can effectively manage its infrastructure, courts, etc, through a well-communicated common valuation of those entities.
We are not autonomously self-serving, isolated creatures acting in a vacuum when we have properly identified common interests, and we can and have always formed our own agreed upon jurisdictions locally by taking advantage of common interests to serve at the next higher step of scale, just by valuing the communities we are most intimately familiar with. Baby steps...
Now, with these minimal costs, it's still too early to jump to the massive inorganic conclusion, or the overall expense which is "statism." The burden of proof still remains on statism to explain why we need it at all if we have already had communities that managed and evolved on their own for millennia without it. Wars exist with and without it. Infrastructure exists with and without it. Laws exist with and without it.
Lastly, there is no utopia being pitched, sold, or electioneered within anarcho-capitalism, it's only 1) what already exists in nature before us and some convenient medium of exchange commonly valued by the community: gold, silver, wampum, bitcoin, whatever works for them, and 2) a refusal to believe the statist utopia being sold. So either stop selling it, or itemize the bottom line of what it is you are selling, because for now, it's just voodoo dressed in a cap and gown.
@@clamato54 Nothing you just said works at any scale greater than a small area. Statism exists because its efficient, instead of everyone being involved in everything we can select (or elect) some to manage it aka government. There's a reason governments formed once population increased to a level greater than tribe
How does anything reach mass scale? Either widespread popularity of an organic creation, or one size fits all statist creation. Problems and solutions may come from both state or organic creation. Look at what you're using to type this. It's loaded with standardized parts that sprung from agreements between engineers, community, barely ever statist intervention.
The roads are there but how would they work? Does this mean every road will be a toll road, would it mean the same transport company would also make automobiles, how would they prevent people from using their roads? Or if it's a residential street, would it be home owners who own sections of the road, what if one owner wants to charge for their section of the road but another doesn't etc.?
The road can be the property of the community, not specific individuals, because everyone will use it.
@@oalalv_raoaov what if I am from outside the community?
@@kurthasedd7923 You figure it out. If you're not from a community, you're more likely to be in another, or live alone from everyone else.
@@oalalv_raoaov Or I'm one of hundreds of interstate truck drivers, family living in other communities etc.
But TIK, they are going to say you could have never gotten started if there weren't roads to begin with...
I always laugh at who will build the roads. That is the first move toward Libertarianism for almost every Libertarian is when they see with their own eyes the constant disrepair of roads and constant endless fixing them in ways that don't last. It is exactly government handling of roads that moves most Libertarians to the Libertarian ideas. Government can't maintain a simple road costing me thousands in replacing suspensions early and you want me to believe they can fix big issues like poverty or healthcare. To quote Joe Biden C'Mon Man.
Hurry Rothbard, Ron Haul, Sowell City, Galt's Gulch 😁😁
Asking "Who will build the roads?" is like going to the countryside or to the mountains and asking: "But who made the paths?"
I mean... if you think a dirt path is good enough for a 32 ton truck with cargo to hurdle along at 75 miles per hour safely on... Hell lets go back to antiquity, those paths weren't even suitable for carriages and wagons which is why STATES built roads. Paths existed and people walked them, just dirt paths tramped down by feet. But highways did not exist before the state. That didn't happen in 10,000 years of human history and trade. It's almost as if we have run the experiments and you don't get roads without social organization or something!
@@colonel__klink7548And you think social organization requires the government? This is so funny to me, people in my country 30 years ago wondered if the private sector would be capable of feeding the populace.
Turns out that where there is demand, there is supply. Shocker, isn't it?
@@baph0met Well... The problem with that circular argument is the "private sector" in a modern state is as TIK has pointed out... not private. Not for the reasons TIK has said. It's that there is no such thing as a truly free market, and there is no such thing as a truly free market actor.
Take the USA, it out competes EVERYONE in food production full stop. However in our industry 40% of the farmers, the top producers receive subsidies from the US government to produce more. This amounts to a 5% price bonus for grain. That doesn't sound like much, but for organizations that already have a scale advantage against their competitors it's just devastating to the bottom 60%. This means that every year the process of small farms going bankrupt and selling to the big farm operation is accelerated.
In other words... part of the process to create the greatest agricultural output in the entire world the US state got involved in rigging the economy in favor of accelerating the growth of scale. However the US government does not run these industries itself because the government's incentive is political gain. They rely on capitalists to run these industries because a capitalist leadership's incentives are financial gain. The subsidies also act to ensure that the capitalists can only financially gain by maximizing supply, not by driving prices up instead. It's a bit of clever statecraft.
There's no such thing as "private industry" get that out of your head. Doesn't exist.
@@colonel__klink7548 First time I hear anyone say "circular argument" to the basic law of supply and demand. Lmao.
Yes, the private sector gets mudded with state intervention which tramples on economical calculation leading to wasting of resources. I know. That's why I'm against state intervention.
US government interferes with agriculture leading to over funding and under funding of sectors. Not to mention the crushing of competition, like you nicely described, where small farms are forced to sell to big farms due to horrible government regulations and subsides.
I am well aware, my country's agriculture has been destroyed this way.
@@baph0met See... the reason why I didn't even address supply and demand is that it's cited in situations which are... lets be honest... Childish. I'm not trying to be insulting with that but it is.
Ok lets use an example, there was a demand for cheap clothing in the year 790 just like there was a demand for cheap clothing in the year 1990. Why wasn't there an industry in the year 790 for cheap clothing but there was in 1990? 790 they made all the clothes themselves, the cost (in terms of labor hours) was far far far far far greater. Why wasn't this demand met by the market!? There was less state involvement in people's lives afterall GLOBALLY in the year 790!
Is this a technology issue? No. Because even sewing machines and power tools aside it's still more efficient to have tailors working together at scale to produce generally sized clothes rather than clothes hand fitted like they were in 790. Clothes would be cheaper in 790 if someone just... made a factory. And we see from pen factories in the 1500s, well before machine technology that manufactories did pop up when conditions were met even without modern science!
The problem with the argument of "if we just do absolutelly nothing the market will magically solve everything for us is... it's wrong and it doesn't follow the historical record. It's fact dude. Every single country that industrialized (ie achieved SCALE ) did so with direct state protectionism, involvement and support. Fact. Full stop, fact. Every country that is an industrial power today basically got there by being... China. Every country that thereafter drank the coolaid and decided to go unfettered free trade deindustrialized. Fact. The UK even started de industrializing when trade barriers with India were reduced and they started to lose textile mills.
These are facts. We didn't have an industrial revolution before state support. We didn't have roads before state support. We had subsistance lifestyle before the state. That's fact. You can theorycraft all you want but we have 10,000 years of economic experiments proving ancaps wrong.
I just want to take a minute here and say I was very excited at the idea of a "Sowell City". I wanted to move there, but then I saw "Galt's Gulch" and then changed my mind. I'd like to purchase a one way bus ticket to Galt's Gulch, please, Mr.Transport Company Man.
This is similar to a theory known as 'The Railroad Problem', in which there is one system which is state controlled, and another free enterprise controlled.
Tik youre based AF
Thank you, and I think you were first too! Congrats!
I prefer Railroad Tycoon II but the principle is basically the same. Well explained. Cheers.
[Edit] In Denmark I think we have more paved roads than anywhere else in Europe. We pay for those with our taxes (most often; there are a few private roads, my own incl.) and, though they are form a purely economical perspective a loss, they are of benefit to all: We can all go everywhere we want and fast, on well paved roads. We wouldn't wish to have it any other way.
The useful thing the government could do would be set some uniform standards for electronic transponders, and arrange standard easements for police and emergency responders. This would essentially be a uniform commercial code, except for road usage.
And since everyone owns a smartphone, they could also require that toll rates are published electronically and that a traveller planning a trip can lock in a rate. Then you could have apps that route you based on your preference between time to travel and cost in tolls. That gets you complete private ownership of roads, incentives to fix the potholes, and if you do bring a smartphone you can be rerouted when better rates are offered.
And it'd probably be far cheaper than paying gas taxes since they'd actually go to road owners, and not random government boondoggles.
All good and all until a small town in the middle of nowhere asks a competing foreign power to build a bridge in their town since your local company doesn't find it economically feasible to build one there. Then you're faced with a choice of having to "waste" resources to build that bridge in order to save face or make your country seem backwards in the eyes of the world. This BTW happened in real-life in the US with a town asking the Soviets for aid. Extrapolate that to its eventual conclusion and you will find your citizens turning to a foreign power to provide them with the services you failed to provide and eventually rebelling or seceding. The problem with the ancap utopia is the same one as utopian communism. They can only work in an isolated environment with everyone following a specific set of rules. And they both fail and crumble when faced with outside pressure, alternatives like a hybrid system and people just not following the rules or making up their own. I'm all for reducing government waste and regulations but to say that just giving corporations the power to do everything the government does isn't the solution. What happens when the biggest bus company buys all the other busing competitors? How do you solve the inevitable monopolization that happens with every industry. And large corps always end up creating their own bureaucratic apparatus that is just as stifling as the governments. In the end you're replacing elected nitwits with unelected ones.
You are both historically and economically illiterate, and don't understand how the absolute majority of the goods and services you are provided with, including the roads, were built by private companies. In the UK in particular the absolute majority of the roads was privately built and maintained during the peak of industrial revolution, with no central planners like you required.
@@kasimirfreeman I'm not advocating for central planning. And most roads being built today are done so via governments handing out bids to private companies. My criticism is to the idea that without government this process would somehow work without issue. Maybe if you had basic reading comprehension you'd understand.
You write about states when the video talks about anarchy with communities instead of states.
Luke Smith : Roads are evil
Respect +10
But what about things that do not bring profits, like publik libraries, or space exploration for example?
Public libraries are inefficient and are being closed down across the UK right now with government.
Space exploration is unviable at the moment because the technology simply isn't there yet. In the future it may be... But Musk is doing a fine job compared to Nasa.
@@TheImperatorKnightmusk doing it with gummint money.
Everyone uses government "currency". Nobody is using gold or silver (actual money).
@@TheImperatorKnightI’d still be weary of musk. Since governments are pushing electrical cars for the 0% emission goal.
Aka climate change.
@@TheImperatorKnight true but I’d still be wary of musk. After all governments are pushing electrical cars for the climate change agenda.
But if not for the roads, how are politicians going to pocket the extra money they need for their lavish lifestyles?
You should also play Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic to test socialism. On my first playthrough there was a lot of food in a food factory and none in the supermarkets, lmao
£35 quid on steam...
@@goldenplayroblox5985 yeah, but one always can emancipate the means of production lol
Thing is, government is rarely building them either, at least not with the money they they take from us. Have you looked at the state some of the roads are in?
What's more, here in germany, you have this fun little thing that when a road gets remade, and you own property on that road, you have to pay for it. And since it's a government project, it's always too expensive as well.
Where I grew up in the Stockport area, I lived down an unadopted road. It was just a potholed track.
The local vet up the road used to organise a community bonfire in the road each November 5th, the ashes from which helped fill the potholes.
No one really minded the holes and puddles but when some new houses were built further down the road the council decided without consultation to adopt the road and but a shiny new tarmac surface on it one Summer. I think rates went up as a result.
Nov 5th came along and the Vet built his community bonfire.... Yep leaving a very large melted hole in the middle of the new tarmac.
That was the end of the community bonfires. Some of us liked the old badly made road and the freedoms it gave you.
This is how the UK's canal and rail network came into being.
BUT it required Parliament to grant permission to the private businesses to compulsorily acquire the land from the existing land owners.
How in this computer game is permission, to excise and to pass through private sovereign territory obtained?
Turn Pike toll roads in the UK could be built only because the state was representative of major landowners and not the general population.
It rapidly became clear that to establish infrastructure the traditional right to freedom of the masses had to be suppressed by the interests of a few.
The state is a symptom of the Pareto distribution.
No compulsion required. Buy the land, then build the roads.
PERFECT! The USA I believe built a bridge two decades ago somewhere in Alaska. The bridge wasn't used, didn't connect ANYTHING, so became known as "BRIDGE TO NOWHERE." Somebody in government "SAW A NEED." LMAO.
If some businessmen do build "roads to nowhere," they take on the risk and the loss. That happened, not infrequently in the nineteenth century and railroads. Here in Connecticut, there were a series of railroads built from small seaports inland to essentially nowhere that struggled until they were absorbed into larger railroads, some of which still struggled. But the risk was carried by the taxpayers, but by the businessmen.
Also, theres no need to put asphalt and drainage systems everywhere, people figure out whats actually needed. Outside my house i have clay road, in the nearby capitol of the department (similar to state you could say, im in southamerica) there are even some pure dirt roads. Sure, in the few cases when it rains then well the clay road here is still okayish, the dirtroads however... well, you can drive them in a car, walking them or motorbike might be less feasable but its to rare to rain to invest on that, you can use different routes, motorbikes can drive on the sidewalk where there is one...
I think this argument is not good enough.
I get your point but, if the road is a property of someone, who is going to allow the road to be used freely by everybody?
The bus company president (in this case) could decide to close the road and block the economy every time he is not happy about something and no one can actually complain.
Also, we are using the mentality of "developed" countries. But history clearly shows that most of the time the Government is necessary to start new projects, that no investor would risk on it.
Basic example: who would have ever thought of building the Shinkansen line from Tokyo to Osaka? No private citizen or company would have EVER invested a dime into it, because it is such a huge amount of money that literally no one can afford it.
But guess what! That project was a project that caused an economic boom in the country and allowed the start of the famous Japanese economic miracle.
Yes, nowadays private companies may want to build such huge projects because there is a track record of successes, but no one would have ever STARTED it.
Personally I don't like the Government meddling with the economy and various projects (see the disastrous HS2 project): however, the Government SOMETIMES is definitely necessary.
"if the road is a property of someone, who is going to allow the road to be used freely by everybody?" Will be the property of the community.
I assume this exists in other countries too but here in Japan there are towns in the countryside where you pay almost no property taxes, as a result the government doesn't come out to collect litter, cut weeds or do any of that maintenance.
But locals do it themselves, Everyone has to pitch in and take a turn doing a couple of hours work every few months and as a result you save thousands in taxes and get a better result.
Sure, but like... what about unprofitable roads?
Like the purpose of muncipal infrastructure isn't to connect the factories to the ports.
Theres lots of extremely rural and unprofitable roads required ro make modern life function
Unprofitable roads often do not require asphalt, so they can be laid, let's say, by every resident of the village where the road is needed.
In NJ i lived on a street which the city owns, but it was capped by two county roads, and semi circled by a state highway (rt 4). The street is a steep slope and lots of storms, drainage, issues arise, and it always requires the public utilities who need to get involved. And instead of traffic flaggers protecting workers there are local and county cop cars blocking the street to non resident traffic.
That is why taxes in NJ are stupid high, because every official, worker, cop, inspector has a govt salary with govt benefits
I love the "smacks over the head you idiot" vibe of this video.
Infrastructure is not all about profit and efficiency. Sometimes its ok to dump some money to make it able for people in shitholes to still reach a city. You can't just make everything profit and efficiency driven that can't be healthy for a society...
But but but, government bad :,(
@@htrainman4178 i wish it was that simple. There is a reason why we need laws. Otherwise companies could do literally anything to get profits even if it is to the detriment of others. Im not an advocate for total government control but no regulation is also a wrong way. Yes Government is inefficient but only doing something because its efficient and profitable creates bad incentives...
Private neighborhoods build their own roads all the time in America. Theres an entire private, very wealthy gated community outside Orlando with its own stores, gas stations, is policed by private security, and has a major contract with the county fire department.
It is essentially a private city. The answer to "who will build the roads" is quite simple. The people who live there.
The only possible argument you can make towards government building roads is interstates for national defense, and for very, very rural areas with huge farms making up the majority of the population, or national parks. In which case you do not need sprawling 6 lane roads, you need roads just big enough to handle the expected use, being farm vehicles, tanks, and emergency vehicles.
I might also point out that the vast majority of new roadways is already built by developers, not state agencies. When it comes to roads between towns, we already have those, and have had them for centuries.
Problem is that sometimes the return on investment is not very good. So companies will not do it and the nation will not develop, unless the government takes the risk for the companies. I.e. build harbour or rail facilities so transportation of goods is better and thus it drives growth. Not everything needs to be on the extreme ends as black and white, sometimes you gotta meet in the middle.
Sowell City. Great name. In the Old-Tyme days private roads called turnpikes were built. Who is John Galt?
Amazing, the age old question of who will build the roads has finally been answered!
But who will build the benches made out of milk jugs?
Some Questions:
Can prices of affordable bus tickets make up for the construction of a road?
Will there be any sidewalks if the bus company is the road constructor?
The privatisation of roads would lead to car toll stations everywhere. Would that be a efficient use of labor?
Who is going to stop the bus company building their road straight through your back garden? or a few inches behind it?
Property rights
When i didn't think i could like this channel more, there it is TTD