Quote from: Richy_T on March 14, 2014, 02:27:13 PM

To expand more on the roads thing with a specific example: I work in a place called Cool Springs which is a rapidly growing (yay low taxes) area in middle-Tennessee. It has grown so quickly that the road structure is struggling. This year, Tennessee will spend billions of taxpayers money to upgrade the road structure to accommodate those people (including me). In the meantime, tens of thousands of people are spending a significant chunk of time sitting in traffic everyday leading to untold loss of productivity and/or leisure time and burning significant fuel doing nothing.

And yet... the growth in this area is mostly white-collar. The huge proportion of these people could probably work from home (something you would understand, Keyser). Vast amounts of time and resources could be saved. Yet there is no incentive to do so because those taxes are going to be taken and the roads built regardless. If it was laid out in front of people as a straight choice, maybe things would work out differently. Of course, maybe they wouldn't. But that's kind of the point, to let the market decide. Who knows, maybe we'd even have more roads, better roads. Maybe if you wanted to head to New York from here (or wherever you are) and you had a sufficiently equipped vehicle, you could hop on a 180mph toll road and be there in no time. The point is that the one-size-fits-all of government action leads to inefficient solutions.

The more you explain, the more we should be able to recognize how detached you are from reality.

Roads are NOT going to be built in any kind of efficient way without public funding. Surely, there may be better ways to go about accomplishing the same objectives, but roads are within the community desires about the solution. If you want another solution, besides roads, you have to convince the community to move in that direction. In your rural Tennessee example, that is converting to a less rural existence, the community seems to have decided that it wants more roads.... b/c they see that as the solution to the issue of having more people in the area.