misutip-deactivated20101021-dea asked: I'd like to stress the inequity part though, because I think it's what makes me not believe in capitalism.
Oh, here's a question. In a previous post, you answered my question by linking me to a website. In that website it discussed the idea of highways, and how privatizing it would be better for the consumer/ local small businesses. My question would be, if the highways were to be taken care of by the businesses, should I expect more tolls? And what happens to the streets less visited?
Yeah, I don’t think financial inequity is inherently wrong. Legal inequity, yes, but not financial.
As for private roads, you might have to pay tolls, but not necessarily. There are so many other ways to support roads — advertising comes to mind as an obvious choice. Toll waivers with certain purchases (like parking garages at malls do now) is another. Charitable contributions from the wealthy/businesses also strikes me as a likely option here (they already do it for roadside trash pickup), especially if they could get little signs on the roads with their names on them.
Moreover, remember that roads aren’t free now: You’re paying for them at least as much as you would be if they were private. Gas taxes alone are 20 to 50 cents per gallon depending on where you live. That plus sales and annual property taxes on your car itself meet only about 70% of the cost to maintain our roads; the rest comes from tolls and other, additional taxes. All this, and our traffic is still horrendous while our roads are filled with potholes and constant construction.
So yeah, you might have to pay for private roads. But I find it very hard to believe the price would be more expensive or the product lower quality than public roads. I mean, imagine if Walmart made roads. Walmart is so awesome at making cheap stuff that works well. I would take a Walmart road over a government road any day.
Oh and as for less popular streets…it’s hard to say. It would no doubt be a case by case basis, though I imagine that you’d pay to drive on large numbers of streets, not individual ones (for convenience’ sake, at the very least). Some of that money would pay for the less visited streets, which would logically mean less maintenance anyway due to more limited use.
