Thread: Brock's libertarian response to Wicked Tribe

Originally Posted by deathgodusmc

It isn't just private companies that do that stuff. When 417 (a toll road around orlando) was proposed the agreement was once the road was paid off the toll would go away. Some ignorant people actually bought that line of shit. Well the road has been paid off for some time now and what has changed? The cost of the toll. It has tripled and who runs it? The state of Florida.

Accountability? Im not trying to debate but since when has there ever been accountability with the government? Either way your in the same boat but a government office is more likely to pay for repairs in a timely manner. Other then that i cant think of any real difference between private and government funded roads.

You complaining to a local ward boss will get you 10k times more traction than speaking to some secretary or worse yet, somebody named "Jeff" in Punjab India, at least someone's job/reputation is at stake.

Regarding your tolls tripling since the toll's inception is not quite like the price quintupling overnight... But I understand your anger.

Originally Posted by hawgballs

Entertaining video. I don't buyu it, but ok. So tell me, how does this video apply to public roads, public schools and publicly financed technological research?

Really? What finances all that? The video the best I can figure is about money management and the beauty of it all is you don't have to buyu it.

I have been on a couple toll roads in houston and on the ones in oklahoma. The ones in oklahoma were reasonable cost and had actually gone down the second time I went, well maintained and 75mph. Cant complain, not sure who runs them and how its structured so dont know who to give credit to.

Originally Posted by BrockSamson

Sorry for the delay in responding, I forgot to check back. I don't want to hijack the science thread with this really long response so I am going to move it into its own area. I have to say its fun to discuss this kind of stuff here, I don't get too many opportunities. I will try and take each point in order. Also, I really do believe what I say here. I am not arguing for the sake of arguing. I also know its crazy and not what most would agree with, so you don't need to tell me that, haha. I am a nut, I know.

No problem for the delay, we all have jobs and good call on the new thread.

- The military would absolutely run more efficiently if it was privately run. But, I would never, ever, argue for that to happen. Military is one of the few things that I think the government is responsible for. Private companies live and die on efficiency, and our defense budget and procurement process for defense programs (Tanker contract, F-35, Marine amphibious vehicle) are perfect examples of the inefficiency built into it. A lot of military programs get contracted out under something called "Cost Plus". What that means is that a private company will get the contract and they will tell the government what they think it will cost to do, and whoops if it happens to cost more than that (the Plus part) the government will pay for that too. Now that private company who contracts out another commercial provider sure as hell doesn't do that. Boeing will contact Radio Company A, tell them they need a radio for their new joint army/air-force flying go-cart. Radio Company A isn't the only company that gets a proposal from Boeing, they also send one out to A, B and C. So three companies will now look at the requirements, and try to provide the best value and price and Boeing will make a decission. There is no contingency if it winds up costing more, that company MUST supply the radios for the price they said they would. Now this is a simplified example and all sorts of things can be built into contracts, blah blah blah. This is just a quick not even that good of an example of how inefficient things are. Because I actually agree with you I am not going to argue to much more. haha

So the fact that the government, through the military, get's screwed by private companies is an indicator that we should put more power into the private companies?

Let's imagine that we do just contract out the military. In all likelihood, the result will be one or two large mercinary firms that charge us some fee for their service, which we pay for in tax dollars. Now, if there's only one company (let's call it Blackwater), or several companies that work tightly together, then what we have is a country that has no military, and is occupied by a private military that can pretty much do what it pleases. Don't like Blackwater's latex rate increase? Tough, what are you going to do about it? Blackwater feels like annexing North Dakota as a training ground? Tough, what are you going to do about it? How can you stop them?

Maybe, come war time, they feel like increasing their rates dramatically, maybe they don't feel like fighting. What can we do about it? Nothing.

-Privately funded roads make a lot of sense. First off, think about how we pay for roads and maintenance. We have gas tax, tolls, taxes from buying a car, etc. 5% comes from tolls. So the other 95% you are forced to pay against your will. It would be one thing if the roads were entirely paid for with tolls and you had a choice to use and not use those roads. So we have money taken from us against our will (well 95% of it) and used on a product that you may or may not hardly even use. I know I do not use the majority of roads in my town, and what about the guy or gal that walks and doesn't use roads at all? Should the person that travels 10 miles round trip to work be paying the same amount of money to maintenance of roads as the person that travels 80 miles round trip? Absolutely not. So that brings us to the privitized solution. Given that there is already roads/highways/etc in place it would be very easy for the government to hand it over. I am going to quote directly a few examples:

First, whether you drive on roads or not, you use roads. Your food, for example, has to travel over roads and rail. If you buy anything, then you use the roads, ports, rails, etc. Now, let's ignore that for a second, and assume that you only use the roads that you drive on. Roads are extremely expensive to build, maintain, plow, sweep, etc. If you live in the city, this might not be expensive, since hundreds of families can live on each mile of road, but if you're in a rural area, the cost per person is going to skyrocket as the population per mile of road drops. This means that it could get prohibitively expensive to live in the country.

On top of that, roads, especially highways, are conducive to monopolies. In all likelihood, you're only going to have one highway option between you and your destination. This means that if I run the roads, and you need to get there, I can charge whatever I like, and you're out of luck.

The same goes for pipes, electrical lines, phone lines, etc. It would be unprofitable to maintain these in sparsely populated areas, and in all likelihood, monopolies would arise from these.

"Private road builders are doing this kind of work across the world, such as the double-decker underground highway in Paris, complete with 350 cameras watching for traffic delays or accidents. Any incident is detected in less than 10 seconds. Once the camera detects a problem authorities rush to tow the obstacle away so traffic keeps moving."

I'm aware that privately-built roads exist, but. I don't see anything about the fiscal advantages of this in your quote or anywhere that I can find.

"They do the same thing in California, too, on at least one road: Highway 91. Instead of building a brand-new road, they added two lanes in the middle of an existing highway. Drivers can choose to use them, or not. If you want to go this fast, you have to pay. Different amounts depending on the time of day. Sometimes $1.50, sometimes $9. But by paying you save time. Traffic moves. And for some people, time is money. "

That's great, but if they owned all of the lanes, what's to stop them from charging you $9 for all lanes? What's to stop them from charging $25? For example, part of the deal that CPTC made with the state was that the state was [I]not allowed[/] to make other improvements to the public section of the road, in order to drive up profits for the private company.

"Were these traffic speeding innovations created by government road-builders? No. They were created and paid for by private road-builders."

What improvements? Is this quote related to the previous quote? Please don't just throw text in here without a purpose or expaination.

"Their success has made politicians from other states want to try leasing roads. Mayor Richard Daley did that with the Chicago Skyway. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels leased the Indiana toll road to a private company. He got back billions for his taxpayers. "We received $4 billion, free and clear, no taxes, no debt left to our kids," Daniels said during our interview in January about the lease agreement signed in 2006."

This road was making a profit for Indiana before it was privatized. It was making about $33 million over costs each year, and that $4b bought the company 75 years, so even if they hadn't ever raised tolls in those 77 years, they paid 3.7b to make 4b = 300 million in profit. The cost of that $300m is dramatically higher tolls for drivers. Those toll increases add up to $77m per year, which will cost 5.8b in 77 years. Adding that in, 300m - 5.8b = net 5.5 Billion dollars lost over the course of this project. This, remember, assumes that tolls won't go up.

-As for the things I don't use that I am still charged for by the government... I can certainly go on forever about that, so for the sake of not writing a novel I will skip it, I think my rant about public roads gives you an idea of how far I can go with it. Now, cellular phones, GPS, the internet, medical technology. The reason all of those things are the way they are today is because they are profitable. I pay for the advancement of cellular phone technology by choice when I pay for my $300 Android phone, I pay for the advancement of GPS technology when I bought my Garmin NUVI, I pay for the advancement of internet technology when I give Comcast a stupid amount of money for internet (I fucking hate comcast, and the service is so fucking terrible because they have no competition where I am at, there are no other options) or when I buy something at newegg, amazon, donate money to TPG, etc. All of that money goes to companies and people that utilize and expand the interewebs for profit or exposure. None of that money was taken by force, I give that money willingly because I use GPS, internet, and Cellphones. If it wasn't profitable it wouldn't be what it is today. I am not denying internet, GPS, mobile communication was probably all originally designed with military purposes in mind. But they wouldn't be what they are if there was not a profit drive and a demand for these technologies to be developed by consumers.

Not only were few of these technologies profitable until decades after they were first researched, but they only exist in the form that they do because they're public domain. The internet would not exist as you know it if the technologies and infrastructure behind it was patented and completely privately controlled. Your GPS satellites simply could not exist without nasa. No company has the budget to fund a space program for the 50 years that it took us to get to this point. Your purchase of a Garmin doesn't even come close to covering the cost to develop and deploy the GPS satellites.

Originally Posted by hawgballs

HAHA. Other than throwing a entertaining video our way, it doesn't help the discussion at all as to why there shouldn't be public roads, schools or publicly financed tech research.... All you pointed out was that what finances all of it is tax dollars, which is obvious, otherwise it wouldn't be "publicly funded". Instead, it offers an overly general opinion of how he would spend money. It does nothing to prove that privatizing these works would make it cheaper and more efficient.

Milton Friedman, maybe?

The point I and I believe Mr. Friedman was trying to make is who would use the public money in a more responsible manner which is the crux of the subject; gov vs private. Just to please you your Ballsness !

Privatization - advantage, type, benefits, disadvantages, cost, Growth of privatization, Variations in privatization, Advantages and disadvantages of privatization, Costs and productivity

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=h...%2FRL33777.pdf

Originally Posted by WickedTribe

So no environmental protections? What's the libertarian answer to the guy upstream from you dumping his waste into your drinking water/fishing spot, etc?

Courts