The Progress of Liberty

In response to my article, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization,” Mr. Merlin Jetton has made some comments, to which I will respond over the course of the next few days. This exchange of arguments is, I think, valuable for spreading awareness regarding the possibilities of road privatization and deliberating over how it might be possible.

 Mr. Jetton wrote, “A good part of [Chicago roads] being so poor is the huge volume of traffic they bear. The nicest roads tend to be where there is little traffic (or they are new).”

While this is true, it still does not justify the same stretches of roads being repaved every single summer, as is frequently the case in the Chicago suburbs. The Chicago area is notorious for its corrupt governments, and I strongly suspect that the roads built there are specifically designed to fail once a year (or sometimes, once every few years) and thereby require repairs from the leading government officials’ favored construction firms. Of course, I have no specific evidence for this aside from the general and well-known fact of Chicago corruption and the extreme plausibility of my theory when compared to alternatives and when considering that other less corrupt but equally large metropolitan areas in the country do not experience this kind of dismal road quality. If such specific evidence ever arose, the guilty government officials would surely be subject to public scandal and removal from office – which happens every so often in the Chicago area.

Mr. Jetton wrote, “Streets are repaired often, but not a given stretch every year, nor are they  completely torn up and replaced every year. To say each street’s life is one year because it needs a little repair now and then is akin to saying a person dies when he/she only has heart surgery.”

In Chicago suburbs like Northbrook and Glenview, it is indeed the case that the same segments of streets are re-paved every year – whether the repairs be major or minor. What typically happens in these cases is the following. Government-favored construction firms block off an entire lane or more with the ubiquitous orange construction cones and then do nothing on it for a few months. When they start to do something on it, they only work on a small fraction of the blocked-off stretch, while the rest of the road segment is kept off-limits for no reason. It may well be that the repairs required in any given year are minor, but the traffic congestion is increased irrespective of the magnitude of repairs required, because immense segments of road are blocked off without being immediately worked on. No private entrepreneur would engage in such folly.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com

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