Quote from: myrkul on August 22, 2012, 11:34:29 PM

Quote from: SgtSpike on August 22, 2012, 11:25:52 PM

Quote from: myrkul on August 22, 2012, 11:07:58 PM

Quote from: SgtSpike on August 22, 2012, 10:56:44 PM

1) That's why we have human rights and lawmakers who are supposed to act in the best interest of the people - to protect people against unfair contracts like that.
2) Your plan would introduce vast inefficiencies (way worse than the government) into road building and maintenance. If people are duplicating roads to compete for lower prices, they are putting in way more capital expenditure than is necessary. The reason there is a forced monopoly on things like roadways and utilities is because it doesn't make sense financially to have multiple companies competing for the same thing - the recovery of capital outlay would require prices much higher than is seen today. Instead of me paying $10/month in local taxes to maintain the roadways near me, I might be paying $200 in fees throughout a month of driving on some cobbled-together private road system.

1) "supposed to"... except the very existence of those lawmakers and the system which supports them is an unfair contract like that.

2) Only if someone were to do something like this, blocking off roads, rather than running them for max efficiency. If it didn't make sense for there to be multiple companies competing, there wouldn't be a need for a forced monopoly, one would develop naturally.

1) I disagree.
2) But that's exactly my point - people WOULD block off roads (until paid a handsome sum), or leave the road in a state of disrepair BECAUSE of the local monopoly. And as soon as they saw another competitor try to build a secondary route, the original road owner would lower their fees and repair their roads so that said competitor may as well not even continue building - it wouldn't end up being profitable for him. The existing road would be willing to be a temporary loss leader to drive out the competition, then resume the price-hikes and lackluster upkeep until the next competitor tried to enter the market. Now, if a competitor decided to continue building the second roadway anyhow, then the local market would drive the price down to a reasonable fee close to what we might be paying for road upkeep right now, but spread across two roads. In other words, each road owner would then only be receiving half of the fees necessary to maintain their roads.

It just wouldn't work, at all. There is very sound reasoning behind forced utility monopolies with regulated pricing.

1) Then convince me.
2) Why do you assume that people would be paying for roads they don't use?

Actually the most common local road arrangement through the 1800's, apart from the turnpike system (which outpaced government building by over 400%, for the record), was that local business owners would get together and hire people to build amazing, new roads, so that customers could get to their businesses. Novel idea.

Even a community could do it on a personal level without using violence or coercion. They could simply ostracize the people who don't want to help. It's one thing to withold resources that you are entitled to, and another to attempt to extort someone by threatening to lock them in a cage if they don't use the shit you are telling them they HAVE to, without any other options.

I love how it always comes back to roads and cars. Meanwhile, every single PIECE of a car has a bunch of regulations attached to it (why the basic design hasn't changed in, oh, 80 years or so), and the medium for using a car (roads) has been fully monopolized by the state for 100 years or more. Look at industries elsewhere that the state raped or monopolized and you see the same thing - changes on the margins, but no new paradigms. Trash pickup is still done in the EXACT same way as it was in the 1920's. Recycling is just a money pit that burns up twice the resources it's supposed to save - one of the largest dig-it-fill-it-back-in make-work projects that government has ever imposed on society. Cars haven't changed, even though the theory of the flying car has been around since the 1930's and it has been attempted multiple times in the past (always shut down by government, or only allowed to essentially be a plane that you can drive to and from the airport, which sort of defeats the point).

The opportunity costs of the Statist religion are immense. They make me sad, right down to my soul. We should be saying "Hey, remember roads in cities? What a waste of space!"

And for everyone who seems to think that human beings couldn't manage to use personal flight devices, you imagine what someone in the 1800's would have thought if you had told them "human beings will travel at over 5 times the speed of the fastest horse, over land, in a machine that they fully control, that weighs over five times as much as a horse carriage, and they will travel in groups of thousands of these machines going every which way." Probably about the same shit your Statist, religious brain is thinking right now...