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Roads
Who Would Build The Roads?
Who would build the roads, in the absence of a state?
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So asides from any arguments about externalities, and the various other excuses made by state economists for the state, whenever you advocate the state do anything, you are advocating theft under the threat of imprisonment and if that is resisted, of death. It is a pretty brutal thing to advocate so you had better be saving lives or something close to it when you advocate any state action.
Roads
When someone advocates a stateless society, the question that pops into peoples' minds all the time is: 'but who will build the roads?' Now this is an incredibly simple problem.Private roads exist today and they work fine. Private highways work with tolls. No, this doesn't mean stopping, putting your coins in the slot and driving on at every corner in the road. There are a bunch of ways you can do it: perhaps you can put a little sticker on your car, you buy a sticker every month, you put it on your car, and it tells the guy when you last payed. Or perhaps a card that scans as soon as you enter the road; there are a bunch of ways to do this. An example of the card-scanner would be the FasTrak service in Southern California. The advantage of private highways is that they are built based on where the builders think traffic will be, not based on based on who is best able to secure enough state funds for his district. In fact, that is one reason why private roads exist today: to fill in the gaps that central planning inevitably leaves. And that private roads work despite state roads being free to use? That is, you don't stop having to pay taxes for public roads just because you payed for a private road. That is testament to the degree that the state mismanages it's resources in regards to roads.
Also, because you have to pay to use it, private highways tend to be a lot less overused. This is becoming less and less of advantage as state roads are becoming pay-to-use as well; municipalities actually make people pay what they call 'public roads', even though those roads were built with tax dollars that were payed for by everyone else. What this basically amounts to is the state seizing money for a road from you, in the form of taxation, and then making you pay to use that road. Expect to see more of this as the state continues to fail.
Another advantage of private highways is that if it's a boondoggle, those who chose to invest in the road take the loss, not the taxpayers. And if the boondoggle is just added on to the state's debt, that results in inflation, which hurts the poor the most as the poor spend a greater percentage of their income on consumer goods and have less non-monetary assets.
Now what about the poor? Well, first off tolls aren't that expensive. Today, now this is July 16th 2009, and the hyperinflation hasn't kicked in yet, here are some rates for the toll-roads in Southern California. It's really not that expensive. What's more is that in a stateless society if an employer wants workers, he's going to have to factor in the costs of using the toll-road. And since he's no longer paying any taxes for the state roads, he now has the money to pay for those toll-roads. Also, there is a built-in incentive in toll-roads or private roads to carpool. As for private roads on the smaller scale, well that's really not an issue that can be addressed too specifically. First off, private roads around businesses work just fine. Agents of the state posing as regulators take their cut, and yes I know, towing laws are state enforced laws, but in a free market you will still have private towing companies and towing cars just wouldn't have state sanction. And the towing companies would be much better armed I would imagine. There would certainly be a lot for business to work out in a stateless society, but remember that each person is making the adjustment that he needs to make to adapt to his environment around him that's changing. It's not like a single central planner needs to understand how all these things will work and how everything is going to change. There is no central plan; everyone is doing their calculation for their own situation.
Roads for a residential neighborhood, in my estimation, will more closely mimic the housing quality in those neighborhoods. Crappy neighborhoods will have even crappier roads than they do now, and rich neighborhoods will have even nicer roads than they do now. Most neighborhood roads will be free to use and so it's possible that a neighborhood road could become, as a result of being situated between two major arteries, they could become extremely popular with a lot of through-traffic. Now if this happens there are many ways that this can be dealt with. The neighborhood may just decide to erect a toll-booth with retractable spikes for people who don't pay, or perhaps one of the end of the roads could be walled off, making the street a dead-end and so that would get rid of the through-traffic, since it's no longer a through-street. And remember, these people don't need a license so there is no state to sue them if they try to prevent traffic from going through their street.
Now my prediction is that in a stateless society roads would be used a lot less. State roads function as a subsidy for the auto-mobile industry who are very well politically connected. And so the initial building of all these roads was not so much a reflection of genuine demand but of corporatism, and these companies that lobbied the state to have all these roads it makes having a car much more desirable. Because of this I predict more rail being built and used in a stateless society, and even perhaps having a bunch of rail being built on the already existing roads. And it would be proper: it would be a reflection of genuine desire, not some forced project and/or a play-thing of the political class, as roads have become today.
There is so much head-ache with roads today that I think a lot of people assume that only an agency as large as the state can overcome these problems, that is, they look at these problems and go 'oh my god, these are some really huge problems; only a state can overcome these really huge problems.' But of course it's state-management of the roads that created these problems and created these head-aches in the first place. Because as a monopoly the state doesn't have an incentive to do a very good job, and by free to use these roads are constantly being over-used. The first roads were private. Roads are no problem in a stateless society and can really be a lot better. In a stateless society you can look forward to less and less-crowded roads.
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