Short answer: where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
As an anarchist nothing is certain, except death and people asking you “Who will build the roads?”
I may detest government above all other man-made organizations but I must applaud its enormous success at marketing *cough..propagandizing..cough* the idea that it is completely, utterly unthinkable that roads could be made without government. It is impressive just how many people will quickly ask me this question when I profess my distaste for government as though it’s something I’ve never considered. You’d think that roads were some precious human right that all other rights originate from; they are the philosophical foundation upon which we uphold government. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Roads. I apologize for the sarcasm.
I beseech you to use your fantastic imagination. I know it’s hard to visualize a world in which roads were not created by the government but bear with me please.
What’s the big deal about roads anyways? What are roads for? Seems like a silly question but you asked a silly question first. Transportation obviously! People need to get from A to B. Roads are a means by which people travel. But one key thing here is that roads are a means, among many means. What sets automobile transportation apart from possible more efficient, eco-friendly means of transportation?
Humans face the problem of transportation. For every problem there are usually multiple ways of solving it and there’s always the possibility of somebody inventing a new way of solving an age old problem. What if a new way of doing transportation came along but it wasn’t able to flourish due to the distorted cost of creating and marketing a new transportation method. How do we know for certain that that trains or subways or something you couldn’t even think of wouldn’t have been much more common in a free society? You may laugh at me for suggesting that a theoretical way of transportation could have supplanted roads and cars by now but remember that monopolies (government creates monopolies) forcefully muscle out competition and suppress progress. And a monopoly is exactly what the government has on roads. Good theoretical ideas remain only ideas if the competition is given an unfair advantage.
As a mere thought exercise it doesn’t make logical sense that roads can’t be produced by businesses. There is no characteristic that makes roads different from other complex products or services offered on the free market: who really pays for roads? Taxpayers, but more simply people pay for roads. Why do they pay for roads? Because those people want roads, supposedly. Who builds the roads? You may think the answer is government and you’re right to an extent but more simply and truthfully it’s people. People build roads. So just to be clear, right now in the real world there are people who want roads and people who are willing to build roads.
When you wonder who would build the roads the answer isn’t very surprising: people. Free people will build roads if people want roads. It’s irrational to believe people who already build roads for people who want roads would stop doing so if not forced to pay for them. If roads are such a dire need then they can be funded by voluntary means.
Compare the argument for government funded roads to any other product or service and you sound crazy: “But who would make the shoes?” “Who would build the houses?” You've got to be aware that you’ve grown up in a world where roads everywhere are “built by” government. If you grew up in a world where all houses were built by government you’d have a hard time imagining how it would work in a free society! But let’s address the one and only argument that a pro-government roads individual has: payment method.
The hardest thing for most people to imagine is payment. And, granted, it is the trickiest part. It isn’t impossible though. Besides, just because paying for something is tricky doesn’t justify taking everybody’s money to pay for it!
There are two ways that you can pay for something you consume or utilize: directly or indirectly. One could expect both methods of payment to be used if the forceful method of taxation weren’t used. You could pay Roads Inc. yourself and have a membership based on what roads you use the most. You could pay to have a device put in your car that registers whose roads you use when you’re driving and that can be hooked up to your bank account and pay automatically.
Of course a feature of market solutions is that they tend to produce the most efficient and least brotherly solutions. If we didn’t have to pay for the roads directly that would be ideal. This means there would probably be a fair amount of roads that were owned and built by businesses or groups of businesses who want people to have good access to their stores and shopping places. Just how Wal-Mart wants you to be able to park in their parking lot they would also prefer you be able to arrive at the store. They, along with all businesses, would have a strong financial interest in paying for companies to build quality road networks that provide them with traffic to and from their particular areas. This way you and I don’t have to pay directly for the roads we’re using but by buying and purchasing from different stores and malls we would be paying for the roads.
We could also pay for roads through the community we voluntarily choose to live in. Say you move into a neighborhood that has streets all throughout it connecting you to the surrounding area. As a part of the contract of buying the house one might agree to include payment for the upkeep and maintenance of the streets nearby.
That’s not all though. There could be hundreds of other clever ideas of payment methods that I don’t know of and that’s the beautiful thing. When you have a system where people have the freedom to be able to create and improve on existing ideas we all benefit! In too many peoples minds today the only possible way to pay for roads is through taxation. How tragic!
