Comment by enoch_r | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enoch_r | Hacker News Reader

As someone who leans quite strongly libertarian, I do not understand what seems to be the default libertarian position on roads.

The default view seems to be that government-funded highways are essentially a god-given right. If I want to travel 30 miles every day from home to work, well, somebody had better build me a 8-lane highway to get me there with a minimum of congestion. (Sure, maybe sometimes we'll implement congestion pricing that will cover a miniscules portion of the cost of building and maintaining the highway. This is still a massive government subsidy for people who drive.)

Bike lanes, on the other hand? Public transit? Those get the more typical libertarian viewpoint on government spending. How dare the government try to distort our incentives by spending millions of dollars to provide bike infrastructure?! (Fun fact: As of 2008, the replacement cost for all of Portland's bike infrastructure was estimated at $60M, the rough cost of one mile of urban freeway. I'm sure it's gone up by then--it's still a rounding error.)

It's genuinely weird how libertarians--generally not ones to ignore the effects of government spending on incentives--don't appear to notice that spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a transportation system that you can only use if you're in a car might actually, you know, cause more people to drive.

Most libertarians would say that roads should be paid for by users, not by people through taxes. Some of them might claim that gas taxes amount to a user fee, but I actually don't see that claim too much from libertarians (gas taxes don't pay close to the cost of maintaining roads).

On the other hand, libertarians are not a particularly large segment of the population. The segment of people who merely don't want to pay for what they don't themselves use is a much larger segment than libertarians, and while it may sound libertarian at first glance, it's really not (they want others to pay for their needs even if the others don't use it).

Another confounding factor is that transit tends to be used by Them. And God forbid government does anything to benefit Them, especially if it doesn't benefit Us but hurts Us instead.

> The default view seems to be that government-funded highways are essentially a god-given right.

What sort of libertarians are you hanging out with? I'm not a libertarian myself, but most of the ones I have talked to about roads wouldn't agree with this. Their usual position is that roads should be privatized and tolled, and that this would help fix the externalities (traffic, concrete deserts, suburban sprawl) caused by "free" access to roads, if people had to pay their true cost.

I think this is an example of real versus expressed preferences: I’ve known a bunch of libertarians who would when thinking about the issue say all roads should be toll roads but at all other times act as if they should be taxpayer funded, complain that their taxes are way too high and should pay for plenty of roads, talk like construction prices shouldn’t have gone up since 1960, etc. Their unconscious way of thinking about it was basically the same as everyone else, and I think that’s in part because like everyone else they didn’t really want to pay every time they drive somewhere.

One can be a libertarian in the sense of believing that the optimal system would be privately owned roads with each road owner being able to set pricing appropriately for their road, while also believing that, since such a system is not going to magically come into existence in an instant, there is still potential value to be gained by trying to improve the current system.

Or, to put it somewhat differently: our current system is basically that governments own the roads. Well, if they own the roads, then they should take responsibility for properly managing them--which includes making sure the people who use the roads are aware of their real costs, and also making sure that those costs are reasonable. If I'm paying taxes to the owner of the roads in my area for years, while seeing no maintenance at all being done on those roads, I have a right to complain even if I don't think the government owning the roads is optimal to begin with.

I understand that, it's just that I've heard plenty of “the {city,state} should make my commute better” rants and no calls to, say, charter a toll company that I can remember. Come to think about it, I've also heard more complaints that existing tolls are too high than calls to create more toll roads.

At some point it's natural to wonder whether this is something they find ideologically necessary but don't actually want.

> (Libertarians') usual position is that roads should be privatized and tolled

Do libertarians think this will lead to rich neighborhoods having much better roads than poor people and think that's fine, or is there some reason to think that wouldn't happen? To my mind, the fundamental the difference between a free-market approach and a socialist approach is: if you want something to be cheap more than you want it to be fair, you privatize it and let the free market work its magic, and if you want something to be fair (for some definition of "fair" defined by the legislature) more than you want it to be cheap, you socialize it and put a bunch of inefficient bureaucrats in charge.

We as a society use the former system for things like pants and potato chips, and the latter approach for most types of infrastructure, and I wonder if anyone can really predict all of the things we'd lose from abandoning that. If every road I personally drive on were kept in good repair but a lot of the other roads in my town went to shit, I would be adversely affected in a lot of subtle and impossible-to-send-someone-a-bill-for ways.

> Do libertarians think this will lead to rich neighborhoods having much better roads than poor people and think that's fine, or is there some reason to think that wouldn't happen?

Rich neighborhoods often have much better roads than poor neighborhoods under our current system. I don't know that it would be any worse under a system where roads were privatized.

Also, you seem to be assuming that rich people and poor people never use the same roads. But they do; most roads are not internal to rich or poor neighborhoods but are connecting different areas, and both rich and poor people (and everyone in between) end up using them to get where they want to go. So the question isn't really whether rich or poor people are using a road; it's a question of how much potential revenue there is from road users overall vs. what it takes to build and maintain the road.

> if you want something to be fair (for some definition of "fair" defined by the legislature) more than you want it to be cheap, you socialize it and put a bunch of inefficient bureaucrats in charge.

The problem with this is that it doesn't make the thing fair; it just means that the unfairness is based on political power instead of on economic power. And experience strongly suggests that unfairness based on political power is worse than unfairness based on economic power.

> Rich neighborhoods often have much better roads than poor neighborhoods under our current system. I don't know that it would be any worse under a system where roads were privatized.

Do they? Better how? Maybe they're slightly better in the "potholes get fixed sooner" sense, but I'm worried more about poor/rural roads being abandoned because they're not profitable to maintain. Or worse, shunted back to government in a "privatize the profit, socialize the costs" scenario.

I'm curious to see a detailed plan if there's one floating around that has some steam behind it, as a lot of this of course depends on the details of how privatization is implemented. But if the argument starts and ends with "Well, privatizing things is inherently good, why should roads be different?" then I'm strongly against. If you want to up-end a perfectly functional transit system in a radical and poorly-understood way, the upside has to be a lot clearer than "I don't know that it would be any worse under a system where roads were privatized"!

What you're discovering is why most Americans of other political persuasions take such a dim view of modern American 'libertarians'. Most of them just use libertarianism to mean "I want taxes to pay for the things I personally use, but not anything else'.

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