The Progress of Liberty

I continue my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “Mr. Stolyarov comments about sections of roads being blocked while not being worked on. No doubt that is true and many of us have witnessed it, but I suspect he exaggerates. For example, he says ‘… do nothing on it for a few months.’ Not days or weeks but months?”

It may be an exaggeration to say that the government-hired workers do nothing on the entire blocked-off part of the road for months, but it is quite true – from numerous instances of my everyday experience – that they do nothing on a particular blocked-off segment for months. This was my primary intended meaning in Part 1 of my response. What happens frequently is that a stretch of several miles in length is blocked off, and the construction work begins at one end and takes several months to reach the other. The construction cones are not removed from the segments on which work has been completed until the entire blocked-off area has been fully repaired. Moreover, the areas remotest from the segments on which work began first stay blocked off for months before the workers actually reach them.

Most sensible private road owners will only block off those areas on which work is being immediately done and will move the construction cones as the construction crew moves to new stretches of road.

Mr. Jetton further writes: “Many years ago I worked on road construction, both concrete and asphalt. The work is monitored by state inspectors who struck me as quite competent, at least the head engineers. I witnessed a state engineer order a stretch of brand new road be removed and redone because of poor work.”

I grant that there are competent people working in the construction of government roads, just as there would be some incompetent people working in the construction of private roads. What is crucial, however, is whom the system of control tends to reward and whom it tends to punish. For instance, I have been informed by several former government employees, about how government bureaucracies like the EPA treat economists that work for them. The economists are mostly competent and give reasonable recommendations. But they are sidelined and ignored at best and often bullied for not using their work to affirm the preconceived notions of agency leaders, who frequently have politically motivated agendas rather than agendas devoted to objectively sound policy. I suspect that a similar dynamic is at work with regard to government roads. Some (and perhaps many) competent government inspectors and technicians try to do as good of a job as they can from a technical standpoint, but the politically motivated higher-ranking officials in charge of them often second-guess and overrule their decisions or else improperly set the entire range of government priorities with regard to road construction and design.  

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

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