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Originally Posted by Renton
I've sort of turned into an anarcho-capitalist over the past year or so, but one of the things I am having trouble envisioning the private sector handling is transportation. I think there's probably a way to do it and they'll figure it out but I just don't have the imagination to foresee it. It's such a huge cost, requires so much land, and so much planning by relatively few people. We can all agree that the benefits of easy transportation are more than worth the mammoth costs, I just am not sure if the average person would voluntarily kick in his dime to get it done without force from the state.
Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan
I'm kind of in a similar boat as you. I have trouble imagining a purely free market solution to transportation.
At the very least though it doesn't make a lot of sense for transportation to be handled at the federal level. City and state governments would have a better understanding of what sorts of transportation projects are good for their area. It's like Mcdonalds corporation running a store out of dubuque iowa from the federal office. Local management should have a much better understanding of how to make the best decisions for the store.
I think the governments gigantic investment in the car industry by creating roads and highways was terrible mal-investment. This was essentially a government subsidy for people to buy cars despite other options being much more economical. If you look at it from an extreme point of view, imagine if the government gave away cars for free. You would have people who have very little use for them, like people in big cities or who live so close to their work they can walk, getting cars for the government. The resources used to make that car, parts, labor, etc. would've been used much more usefully, say to pay for housing for a homeless person, if the government did not create that car. This is not that dissimilar to the situation now. By providing free roads you create an incentive for people who do not need the car to get one, even though those resources would serve a better purpose used elsewhere.
Well, you'll be happy to know there's another one of these things with respect to mass transportation.
The US Postal service originally subsidized air transport and demanded planes large enough for commercial passenger service under the 1930 McNary-Watres Act which forced the consolidation of private companies into an oligopoly capable of supporting the development of what would become the DC-3.
One of the companies created in this process was Boeing.
And Boeing had a problem. Everytime it endeavored to create a new aircraft, it was betting the farm. It was a decade+ life cycle where you would take massive losses from negative cash flow for 6 years, then breakeven maybe 12 years later.
The solution was for the federal gov't through the arm of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) to artificially set airfare prices high. This forced private airliner companies to put in large orders for newer, greater aircraft to justify the high cost of airfare or else risk failure for delivering a service that can't justifiy its price.
This lead to an enormous boom of technological advances in the aero industry. In 20 years, we went from 28 people DC-3s to the Boeing 707. Another decade and we had the Boeing 747.
Cool stuff, imo.
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