The Progress of Liberty

I offer the seventeenth part of 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 points out that California has among the worst roads, despite its favorable climate, and Florida has good roads despite swampy areas (swampy areas are cited as contributing to poor road quality in Louisiana).  This might explain that. Florida has 657 miles of toll roads, the highest of any state. California has 96 miles. Louisiana has 1.5 miles. Do you think that just maybe this has any connection to road quality? He cites I-40 in Oklahoma as a poor road, despite a favorable climate. Well, OK has lots of toll roads, but I-40 is not one of them. (link  I-40 runs E-W in the center.)”

It is fair enough to say that the number of toll roads in a state has a connection to road quality in that state and that generally services that are paid for voluntarily or quasi-voluntarily on a per-use basis are more efficiently provided than services that are paid for through a compulsory tax system that charges everyone, irrespective of what roads they use, how much time they spend on them, or what the quality of those roads is. If it is possible to transition all government roads to government-owned toll roads while at the same time eliminating all tax funding of roads and relying solely on tolls, this situation would be an improvement over the status quo. Individual customers will have a greater incentive to be more efficient with their road usage, as the costs of each use will be more clearly visible. Governments will have a greater incentive to maintain road quality and accessibility to traffic, because their toll revenues will depend on these factors.

But while government toll roads are an improvement over tax-funded roads, I see two possible problems arising from them.

First, even with toll roads, government retains a coercive monopoly over road provision. Under a coercive monopoly (the only genuinely harmful and lasting kind of monopoly), prices are permanently higher, and output and quality are permanently lower. Private toll roads, subject to market forces, will thus be an improvement over government toll roads. I am not an opponent of taking the intermediate step, but I do wish to note that it is in fact an intermediate step in a desirable direction. I believe that even further steps should be taken in that direction, however.  

Second, there is little to deter governments from instituting tolls and keeping existing tax funding of roads in place. This is a practical difficulty that might be overcome by packaging road reform legislation together. One part of the reform bill might turn all roads into toll roads, while the other part might repeal all taxes used to pay for roads and thus result in greater real incomes for road users. I suspect that once such a bill is implemented, the vast majority of people will end up paying less in aggregate for roads than they currently do.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

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

Writer, Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46796/g_stolyarov_ii.html

Author, Implied Consent, A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life: http://rationalargumentator.com/impliedconsent.html

Author, A Rational Cosmology: http://rationalargumentator.com/rc.html

Author, The Best Self-Help is Free: http://rationalargumentator.com/selfhelpfree.html                     

Author, The Progress of Liberty Blog: http://progressofliberty.today.com/

Trackback URI | Comments RSS