Sort of a response to Mike and Jack’s comments:
I recognize needing speed limits too. People that are going way over the speed limit should always be penalized. The problem is when the entire point of catching speeders turns into a game of “the speed limit is 35, let’s catch the guy going 44″ instead of simply ignoring it. He isn’t going to kill anyone. If the guy was going 55 then there’s more justification involved.
The problem is that it is completely arbitrary. This is why public government has no business building roads. Not only are they unsafe, they are bad at directing traffic, encourage wrecks and make unsafe highways, and spend large amounts of money to maintain that private highways have never needed.
All roads should be homesteaded off and turned into private roads. The advertising potential is great, insurance companies and the road-owning companies would try to make roads be travelled on as fast as possible, as safe as possible, and overall the entire country would benefit for it.
I struggled a long time trying to believe private roads were the only way to go, but after reading about it for a while (and seeing that private roads have always existed and were even the dominant form of road in early America) I have decided it is the only way to go.
I didn’t get a speeding ticket, I just thought cops should respect property rights instead of giving people tickets who are barely breaking the speed limit and will probably never kill someone in a car.
(Why Central Planning Doesn’t Work For Roads [just like everything else])
As someone who worked for a private road company (the NTTA) building systems that are now used as far away as Illinois, I will tell you. They are scary organizations, every bit as power-hungery as government. Ask the epople of the Colony down here; their only access out of the suburb, built by tax money, was essentially sold to the NTTA. Those folks have a whole lot more input with government than with that corporation.
A private road is a private MONOPOLY with all the evil that any monopoly entails.
They may be useful in certain very limited situations, but as a generality they must be opposed.
Mike is dead right on this one.
That is why you missed the whole point! I was trying to focus on a free market system–when someone has leverage with the government, it is no longer free market but instead is corporatism\mercantilism.
I believe every word you just said and I do not trust any sort of large private road company that is essentially getting a government granted monopoly.
A true free market system would have competition in roads and would eliminate the government-sponsored monopoly.
Remember, Jack, most monopolies (99%+) are only in existence because government says the monopoly is legal. In a free market there are rarely ever monopolies–and when there is, it is because they have met the needs of consumers better than their competitors.
Jack pegged the issue; a road- especially the major toll roads- forms a monpoly.
Jack; we have agreed with each other on the same day. That’s downright scary; one of us must be ill :))
Have you ever driven in Mexico where in many places traffic enforcement is null. The roads are littered with memorials. There are a lot of drivers out there with poor judgement and if you take away the concern of a traffic ticket then they will put others at risk.
“monopolies (99%+) are only in existence because government says the monopoly is legal. In a free market there are rarely ever monopolies–and when there is, it is because they have met the needs of consumers better than their competitors.”
Not so.
You need to re-read American economic history prior to the trust-buster period. And Adam Smith.
We still suffer from some of the evils that the unrestricted monopolies created way back then.
Lance-
You might be the biggest idiot I have ever heard in my life. The vast majority of roads you drive on are indeed public, and they seem to be doing just fine. If you cannot accept the guidelines for travel on these roadways, you are welcome to not use them.
The idea of highways littered with ads destroying our natural landscape is preposterous. Perhaps a quick read of Rousseau’s Social Contract (one of the primary influences on the founders of our govt.) will remind you anti-govt nuts that a society is based on an entity designed to protect the basic rights of all and to ensure the benefit of the collective will. Public roads are a function of just that. If you have decided that you no longer appreciate or can participate in that collective will, you are welcome to take your self-centered ass elsewwhere and thus improve the gene pool for the remainder of those of us who chose to participate in a functioning society.
Oh and for you “Birthers” out there….Dear god- get a life! He has put his birth certificate on-line. Just because you lost an election does not make it illegitimate. How about coming back from the UFO you have been flying around on and join the rest of us in reality as we do the real work of trying to rescue this country from the misery inflicted on us by eight years of incompetency?
Steven, he has put his ‘record of birth’ online, a wholly different and separate document than the official birth certificate. Why they continue to refuse to release the latter gives one pause.
As far as I’m concerned, the ‘record of birth’ proves he was born in this country. However, what is the name on the official birth certificate?. If it does not match what he was sworn in as, and he has no record of a later name change, there is a different Constitutional issue (though far more minor than if he hadn’t been born here.
Part of hiding something effectively is having people ask the wrong questions.