There is a problem with the roads – and it isn’t just the potholes.
The fundamental problem is government.
Government roads are – like government schools – owned by the government, though both are financed by you and me, whether we like it or not. Even if we don’t use them, we are taxed to pay for them. But we enjoy no meaningful control over what we’re forced to finance.
Land is expropriated to accommodate the government’s schools and roads; the former owner “compensated” to whatever extent the government considers to be “fair” – irrespective of the cost to the former owner. The public is then permitted conditional use of the government’s property, which is very cleverly styled “public,” implying they are “owned” by everyone. Yet no one – except government – has any meaningful ownership claim over that which the government controls.
In this way, the people are fooled into believing they have gained something at no cost as opposed to paying a very heavy price for it. Former rights – including to travel, freely – turned into conditional privileges given (and withheld) at the pleasure of government.
But without government, some cry, there would be no roads!
This is like saying that without government, we’d have no food.
Interestingly, there were roads – and food – long before government began asserting control over them.
Needful things create an incentive to provide them, which some people do and which other people are happy to pay them for.
The difference being – when they are provided by people without the force of government involved – that no one is forced to pay for them and when someone chooses to pay for them, they enjoy the right to use them. Just the same as you have the right to eat the food you just paid for. No one would insist you must have a license to buy food and that you may only buy certain foods and then eat them in the prescribed manner (and quantity).
Well, actually, some (naturally, in government) are beginning to insist upon some of those things and the “public” begins to accept the impositions, having been habituated to the idea that “public” (i.e., government) is preferable to private – and that the “public” has an “interest” in laying down the various terms and conditions. The “public” being those in government who tell the “public” – that’s everyone else – what they’ll be allowed to do and punished for if they don’t do it.
