Cato scholar re-thinks toll roads in light of restrictions on freedom of travel
Could it be that the Libertarian think tank, Cato Institute, one of the foremost advocates of privatizing public infrastructure (aside from the Libertarian Reason Foundation) with very anti-taxpayer, anti-property rights deals called public private partnerships, be re-thinking its position in light of reality? I never thought I'd live to see the day...
The Mirage of Free-Market Roads
By Megan McArdle, The Atlantic.com
Timothy B. Lee -- Writer with Ars Technica and the Cato Institute
If you're driving through certain West African countries, you'll be stopped every few miles by armed men--often in police uniforms--who will demand payment in exchange for letting you pass.
I have a somewhat similar experience every time I drive from my home in Philadelphia to Washington, DC. As I'm driving up Interstate 95, I'll periodically be stopped by people in uniforms (thankfully not armed) who will demand money in exchange for letting me through.
Obviously, there are important differences between these cases. In Africa, the roadblocks are mostly illegal and the payments are generally described as "bribes." In the United States, the practice is known as "collecting tolls" and is government-sanctioned. While no single payment in Africa is prohibitively expensive, the accumulation of charges over a long trip sometimes exceeds the value of the cargo being transported, stifling the flow of goods across Africa. In contrast, tolls in the US are mostly low enough to avoid significantly hampering trade.
These two stories illustrate two different ways to think about tolls. One way is as a "user fee" to cover the cost of constructing the road. The other is as a tax on mobility. There's no clear line between the two, but as tolls go up, they begin to look less like a user fee and more like a tax.
The dual character of tolls has important implications for the current debate over road privatization. A variety of metropolitan areas have undertaken ambitious projects to allow private firms to build and/or operate either entire roads or individual lanes, charging motorists tolls to use the land. This trend has been particularly cheered on by libertarians, who see it as a step toward a more general free market in roads.
While I'm generally sympathetic to the idea of privately-managed roads, I've become convinced that the broader vision of "free-market roads" is a conceptual confusion. In the abstract, the idea of competing, privately-owned roads has a lot of appeal. But the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. Roads are deeply intertwined with governments. They always have been and as far as I can see they always will be. This means that they'll never be truly private in the sense that other private companies like restaurants or shoe factors can be.
Assembling the land needed for a long-distance road is prohibitively expensive without government assistance. Unsurprisingly, private roads almost never come into existence without extensive government assistance. And that means that the profitability of a "private" road depends crucially on how many competing roads the government allows to exist.
It's unsurprising, then, that real-world privatization schemes are often explicitly protectionist. A 2004 GAO survey found that four of the five privately-funded toll road projects started or completed in the preceding 15 years included non-compete clauses that restricted the creation of competing freeways nearby. It's much easier to turn a profit when would-be competitors are barred from entering the market.
Supporters of free-market roads point to the experience of the United States and Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries as the golden age of private roads, but those roads were only private in a limited sense. This history is detailed in Street Smart, an edited collection published by the libertarian Independent Institute. Daniel Klein and John Majewski write that in the United States, "turnpikes were encouraged by government, sometimes by granting of exisitng trails or public roadbeds to turnpikes, sometimes guarantees against new parallel routes, and typically the granting of eminent domain powers." They write that they "cannot say" whether these privileges were important to the success of these turnpikes.
The basic pattern seems to have been the same for British toll roads. Most toll roads replaced previously-existing public roads; the book doesn't say if the new roads were built with eminent domain or other government privileges. Indeed, after thumbing through the entire 500-page book, I didn't find a single example of a country, now or in the past, where most roads were built using ordinary market transactions. The vast majority of "private" roads, around the world and throughout history, came into existence thanks to direct government assistance.
When a formerly-public road is privatized, the public loses the freedom to travel along a particular route that it previously enjoyed. This is true even when new roads are assembled using eminent domain. The Fifth Amendment specifies that property taken by eminent domain must be put to a "public use." So the public has a greater stake in even most privately-constructed roads than they would for an ordinary private structure. That means that even when they're collected by a nominally private company, tolls are partly a tax on freedom of movement.
To be clear, this isn't to say libertarians should oppose road privatization. To the contrary, private road management can be an excellent way to bring private capital and technical expertise to the provision of a public service. But it is to say that private road operators should be viewed as providing a service to the government, rather than operating an ordinary private business. The public has a right to freedom of movement along public roads, and this right can't be extinguished by transferring physical control of the road to a private firm. And libertarians should demand that private operators of public roads follow the same basic principles--non-discrimination, tolls not greatly exceeding the cost of building an operating the roads--that we'd apply if the government were operating those roads itself.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/the-mirage-of-free-market-roads/255167/
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
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How “Free-Market Roads” Can Restrict Freedom
Joe Carter
posted by Joe Carter on Thursday, March 29, 2012, Acton Institute
In a political climate dominated by debates about individual mandates and restrictions on religious freedoms, an issue like road privatization isn’t likely to be on the top of anyone’s list of major concerns. But the excellent post on “The Mirage of Free-Market Roads” by Timothy B. Lee, a writer with Ars Technica and the Cato Institute, is worth reading even if you don’t care about toll roads. Lee provides an intriguing example of why we need to think clearly about how we apply principles to policy:
While I’m generally sympathetic to the idea of privately-managed roads, I’ve become convinced that the broader vision of “free-market roads” is a conceptual confusion. In the abstract, the idea of competing, privately-owned roads has a lot of appeal. But the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. Roads are deeply intertwined with governments. They always have been and as far as I can see they always will be. This means that they’ll never be truly private in the sense that other private companies like restaurants or shoe factors can be.
Assembling the land needed for a long-distance road is prohibitively expensive without government assistance. Unsurprisingly, private roads almost never come into existence without extensive government assistance. And that means that the profitability of a “private” road depends crucially on how many competing roads the government allows to exist.
It’s unsurprising, then, that real-world privatization schemes are often explicitly protectionist. A 2004 GAO survey found that four of the five privately-funded toll road projects started or completed in the preceding 15 years included non-compete clauses that restricted the creation of competing freeways nearby. It’s much easier to turn a profit when would-be competitors are barred from entering the market.
To be clear, this isn’t to say libertarians should oppose road privatization. To the contrary, private road management can be an excellent way to bring private capital and technical expertise to the provision of a public service. But it is to say that private road operators should be viewed as providing a service to the government, rather than operating an ordinary private business. [emphasis added]
Lee touches on one of the disturbing ironies of modern politics: purportedly “free-market” approaches can sometimes lead to more government involvement and greater restrictions on freedom. Those of us on the right side of the political spectrum have always been wary of government. But it’s refreshing to see that many of us are also becoming more aware of the dangers of rent-seeking behavior by crony capitalists.