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Comment by dlsx | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy it, and he starts off eloquently on the tired argument that a privatized company could never handle the burden of maintaining roads.

Ah yes, big government. We would never had the ingenious ability to tar and pave roads without your bloated schemes to pocket large percentages for politicians.

Politicians ladies and gentleman are the big problem in Washington. They are expensive, and if you look at their net incomes year over year astoundingly they continue to make absurd profits regardless of the functioning American economy or not.

If politicians were willing to volunteer their "Services" then I would agree with the sentiments. However, as long as they are able to be bought relatively easily, it allows more corruption and extortion to take place. There is a libertarian solution to everything, and in every instance a free market perspective should be applied to government officials who can't seem to cut the fat out of their vicious diet.

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I would think the acquisition of the land on which the road is built would be a larger problem for a privatized company than the actual construction and maintenance of the road.

And where's the incentive for private corporations to build infrastructure for the public? Government isn't the answer to everything, but neither is the free market.

um, they collect tolls?

Toll roads run into the problem of positive externality. Specifically, transportation creates large positive externalities. A road creates economic benefits not just for people who use them to get from point A to point B, but direct economic benefits for stores, developers, and employers along the route. Tolls capture only the part of the benefit felt by people traveling on the roads. As a result, if you fund roads using only toll revenues, you'll end up building less roads than your economy needs.

So ask the stores / developers / employers along the route to buy-in on the road. Ask them to help pay for construction and give them a cut of the tolls proportionate to their investment. This lowers external capital requirements to create new roads. Tolls could be used primarily for maintenance and upgrades, but may have some profit associated to pay back the initial investment. If the associated nearby economic interests are invested in the road, incentives seem pretty well aligned to me. Thoughts?

Why should the stores along the route buy-in? They'll get the benefit of the route for free even if they don't buy-in.

As for giving the stores a portion of the tolls, that doesn't help, because you're still trying to recover all the costs of construction from a subset of the people who benefit from the road. Think about the math: say drivers benefit X from the road and stores and developers and employers benefit Y. Total social benefit is X + Y. With tolls, your incentive to build roads is F(X), insensitive to Y. So whether Y = 10x or 0.5X doesn't change your incentive to build the roads at all. In other words, the incentives aren't aligned with the social benefits.

That's silly you can say that about a lot of things. If a large company builds its headquarters in a place that is going to have 'positive externalities' on the surrounding area too but that doesn't stop companies from locating their employees together in buildings because they are worried they might benefit other surrounding businesses.

Roads as with anything have a symbiotic relationship with the nearby community. If there are no places people want to go along a route then people won't use it or pay tolls conversely if there is no road to get to a business no one will go there either.

Privately built roads, railways and pipelines have often solved this problem in the past. One way to deal with the holdout problem is to just buy options on land along various alternative routes, then only exercise the options once they collectively add up to a viable path.

What's the libertarian solution to corporations raping the environment in order to siphon the value of the commons into the pockets of a few executives and investors?

Under what regulatory regime is a corporation able to rape the environment and siphon off the money? Who says that corporations as they exist today should exist in libertarian-land? Perhaps you'd have only LLCs where the limitation of liability is actually rather small and as such management would take an active role in ensuring that they weren't personally liable for the rapacious behavior that some corporations exhibit today.

Up until Glass-Steagall was repealed Goldman-Sachs was a relatively well run bank that was entirely privately owned and all the partners there made sure people weren't doing crazy subprime stuff because it would negatively impact the bottom line over the next decade or more.

Nassim Taleb talks about "skin in the game" as a requisite for moral decision making. Perhaps libertarians would say that you can't perform in a managerial role at a company without having some meaningful skin in the game. Would people find a way to dodge that? Sure. But companies who did dodge it would tend to be short-term greedy, not long-term greedy and as a result they would tend to go bankrupt faster thus ridding us of the unpleasantness of their existence.

> Perhaps you'd have only LLCs where the limitation of liability is actually rather small and as such management would take an active role in ensuring that they weren't personally liable for the rapacious behavior that some corporations exhibit today.

This highlights the bizarre statist-libertarian cognitive dissonance where they hate on government but then argue that lawyers and lawsuits are the solution to everything.

Mediating disputes =/= Government

You need to understand that libertarians are not against mediation or even courts. If someone commits fraud, or pillages the environment, there are plenty of ways of punishing them without government. Appreciate the value of reputation.

Front-loaded prevention (ie regulation) serves as a damping mechanism against short-term maximization with irreversible consequences. A lawsuit and ruined reputation do nothing to stop the next guy.

From my understanding libertarians aren't 100% anti-government but rather "anti-government-solving-everything" because of the lack of highly attuned feedback loops.

I'm against government taking over too much because I think it's generally a sub-optimal solution. It takes such a huge public outcry to get anything done it's incredible. Egregious problems can get solved eventually but smaller ones are perpetuated in the law, probably indefinitely. Or at least until the next revolution.

When businesses fail all their policy and code and whatever is wiped out. Companies that don't generate profits fail, which causes their policy to disappear and people aren't subjected to failing policy forever.

The self-correcting nature of business (even if it's still sub-optimal) to me seems somewhat preferable to the nature of government which is to grind on -- successful or not -- until people are so fed up with them that something has to change.

Further I'm not a huge fan of financially supporting people flailing about in misguided and asinine programs. The drug war is actively costing me (and everyone else) money when it should have been clear 15-20 years ago that the policy wasn't working and couldn't work. I'm not saying that businesses don't make stupid short-term decisions but they tend to fail faster. Enron did massively stupid stuff but it was founded in 1985 and had died by 2004. It's lifetime was less than the drug war is today, and the drug war might go on another 10 years if we're unlucky.

At it's peak Enron's market cap was $60b. In 2013 we've budgeted $25 billion at the Federal level.

> The self-correcting nature of business (even if it's still sub-optimal) to me seems somewhat preferable to the nature of government which is to grind on -- successful or not -- until people are so fed up with them that something has to change.

Er, but the self-correcting nature of business is simply the result of the fact that the nature of business is to grind on -- successful or not -- until people are so fed up with it that it is forced to change.

It is no different than government in that respect.

Yes, that's true. But there are automatic shutdown provisions inherent in business like bankruptcy. The government that controls the money supply can never really go bankrupt, and even one which doesn't (like those in Europe) still tend not to go bankrupt as they can levy higher taxes, at least up until the point at which there is a revolution.

Businesses start and fail all the time and none of it requires guns or marches or any of that. Which is to say that it's largely peaceful. Something that I'm ardently in favor of.

> Who says that corporations as they exist today should exist in libertarian-land?

Since the corporate form is a government intervention into the free market to protect select players for notional public benefit, presumably, it wouldn't exist at all in libertarian-land, assuming, of course, there is even a small dose of consistency with libertarian rhetoric.

On the other hand, you could just dispense with any kind of consistency and...

> Perhaps you'd have only LLCs where the limitation of liability is actually rather small

How is supporting government intervention to protect select players (even if it is "just LLCs") from liability to the unconsented harms they do others "libertarian"?

> Up until Glass-Steagall was repealed Goldman-Sachs was a relatively well run bank

Glass-Steagall wasn't exactly libertarian, either, so I'm not sure what the point here is.

You wrote a lot of words but none of them made any sense to me, let alone address the question.

>There is a libertarian solution to everything

Oh my..

I must have missed the part of your argument where you conclusively prove that the "libertarian solution" is the best option in this instance.

Roads are payed for already by ticket fines, and freight/shipping deliveries. So, not tax money.

http://www.dailypaul.com/268271/but-who-would-pave-the-roads

There's many different solutions, but of course you are a liberal who prefers to be spoon fed. It's as if you automatically assumed the government solution is the best option sigh

of course I am! Because otherwise you'd have to use logic. Why don't you do me a favor then and "spoon feed" me an argument not full of generic tropes and relevant to the issue?

    Roads are payed for already by ticket fines,
    and freight/shipping deliveries.

What?

Almost all of the federal money for road construction and maintenance comes through the Federal Highway Trust Fund (HTF). It's a standard PayGo operation, but the entirety of their budget comes from taxes. Primarily the $0.184/gallon tax on gasoline and a $0.244/gallon tax on diesel. The remainder from an additional tax on tires and on the sales of industrial vehicles.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/fifahiwy/fifahi05.htm

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/onh2p10.htm

From your link:

> The only thing that will be different is that we will have MANY different roads that will compete with each other.

LOL

To be fair, they might also compete by having wider lanes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMq3w7RVnvc [Seinfeld - The Pothole]

He doesn't need to prove the libertarian alternative. You need to first show how our present road system isn't a complete nightmare.

Touting the road system as a government success. Please.

> You need to first show how our present road system isn't a complete nightmare.

This is reversing the burden of proof. You are the one who wants to alter the status quo, you should have to prove why your solution would be "better".

From my perspective, I can get anywhere I need to, and anything I need can get to me, consistently, reliably, and at the cost of a tiny fraction of my income. Seems fine to me. I see no reason to radically alter the system, and doing so introduces obvious risks I am not willing to accept. So not only is the burden of proof on you, it's a very heavy burden.

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