ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ijmorlan]

Incredibly on point. My favourite bit is how so-called “libertarians” tend to be against public transit and in favour of road transportation. In other words, they are de facto socialists, which is almost the opposite of what the minimal-government libertarianism is supposed to be about.

To be fair, many libertarians have put some thought into how private ownership of roads would work. But at present, our road network is definitely socialized, and almost the exact opposite of a capitalist free-enterprise system.

The idea of private ownership of roads is hilarious.  There can be no more perfect definition of a natural monopoly than roads.

I agree about 95%. I only mentioned it because I didn’t want to mis-represent Libertarian views. As to local roads I don’t see how private ownership could be anything other than a massive opportunity for rent-seeking and corruption. I’m not quite so sure about expressways — conceivably you could have a bunch of them owned by various groups, but I’m skeptical it would actually work in practice. Probably they’d end up consolidating into one organization which would then engage in massive rent-seeking. Perhaps private ownership could work with strict regulation, similar to telecoms. But overall I’d say I’m happy with public ownership, I just think we should use a lot more use-based charges to fund them, especially for the luxury goods that expressways are.