Without Government, Who Will Fix the Roads?

Answering reader questions on market anarchism 2

Yesterday’s “Answering reader questions on market anarchism” went well enough that it is worth doing again. As I expected, y’all’s comments added more answers, making the post and comment thread into a good resource on the subject.

For today’s, I will not cite the name of the questioner or quote the question verbatim, because (s)he turned out to be an uncivil gaslighty anger-person. But the question itself was entirely legitimate. Basically,

In a condition of market anarchism, what recourse does one have if a private owner of a roadway fails to fix or maintain said road properly?

My answer was only partial, and hastily written, but in the interests of time, I will provide it here, in unedited form, as a jumping-off point for further discussion:

Good question.

First, let’s look at what we do now. Now, we have potholes and crappy roads. Eventually, governments sorta-kinda fix them. Or not, depending on the road and area. It doesn’t much matter who you vote for or how much you b1tch. They do a mediocre/mixed job on roads.

So, we start from the notion that what we have now is imperfect. (In other words, we must be cautious about comparing market anarchism to some sort of idealized version of government, rather than to the reality.)

Next, we look at how roads are done by government. As H. Hoppe notes in his magisterial Democracy…, government agents’ incentives are all short-term. They are trying to get elected, reelected, funded, job security, cheap praise, etc. They are trying to get as much as they can out of the office/job, while they have it. They have no long-term interests.

A king is trying to preserve a kingdom for his prince, and the princes yet unborn. A private company is trying to preserve its capital stock. A government official has none of these incentives.

As such, politicians opt for quick fixes to roads that are not built to last. The goal is to make roads good enough, but also cheap enough so that voters don’t freak out. It’s all short-term.

A Roman emperor thinks, ‘Build these roads to last for centuries.’

A roads corporation is thinking, ‘What innovative techniques can we use to build a road that will last and cost us far less over the long haul?’

A politician thinks, ‘Get it done, shut the voters up, and I don’t give a damn what happens when I’m out of office.’

In a circumstance in which there were private roads, roads corporations, etc., you would get some crappy roads, just like you do now. But market forces would always be at work. Companies that did a crappy job would lose business, lose market share, lose stock value, get their roads bought up by more efficient companies, etc.

The situation would not be perfect. But market forces always make things better.

Part of my job is to stop people from falling for or using the logical fallacy of “argument from the brochure.” Even after one has explained how private road ownership would work, one still must face an argument that imagines the worst of such a scenario while simultaneously pretending that government’s version is flawless.

Oh my God, some private road owner somewhere might do a crappy job.

Okay fine, but government ALWAYS does a mediocre job. Roads could be built to last a thousand years, but they never are. And they are always in some state of disrepair. It’s all short-term thinking. Is there EVER a time when some section of I95 in NC, SC, or GA is not backed up due to road work?

If someone, some entity, actually owned the roads and needed to make a profit on them, you can be damned sure they would find a way to make them better. Instead, no one owns them. They’re “the people’s” roads. Which means that it’s just an endless slow-motion tragedy of the commons.

But but but without government, who will build the roads?

(Sorry, I get a little jaded sometimes.)