Government is not necessary to build roads.

My opponent starts by bringing up a country called Paradise, if you look at his links you will see it is really Somalia (which I guessed it would be even before looking at the links, it tends to be the go to example for this argument). The problem is the conditions there are completely misrepresented, what is going on is due to the collapse of a totalitarian government in fact even in the side bar it says Somalia: failed state. That is what it comes down to it was the overbearing government that got them into the mess in the first place. Unfortunately, what is going on over there is more complicated than what my opponent implies and I do not want to get distracted on the Socio-Political circumstances as that would merit an entirely new debate. In Somalia it"s not that they were incapable of building a road it is that there was to much infighting. Sure there government may have built roads but as they say the Fascists made the trains run on time. My opponent describes a situation with two entities ha calls A and B. In response to his claim, B could choose to stop A from building the road, or destroy the road after it was built. My opponent then says "B could choose to stop A from building the road, or destroy the road after it was built". Again, this is exactly what happened during the building of the transcontinental railroad, except in that case both companies were receiving government money in a way that encouraged corruption. He then suggests A could kill B but there are several problems with this. Killing b would violate contract agreements as well as be an act of aggression against them that should be dealt with. The contract itself is made between the parties without the government involved, the only time the government would get involved is if the contract is violated and that actually has nothing to do with the building of the roads themselves. Tolls could replace a fuel tax so that you would pay for how much you drive directly to those who maintain the roads. Maybe they could even have different rates for different types of vehicles. "Unfortunately humans are corrupt. " Very true and what is government made up of but a bunch of humans who are in a position to be even more corrupt than normal. A judicial system is one of the few legitimate purposes for government but this is not directly related to building roads. SO this doesn"t prove my opponent"s point. The government need not be involved in the process of building the road. He talks about the difficulty of drawing a straight line, this is true but it should be able to be straight enough not to derail the train even if done just by sight. Most roads and railroads have curves in them even at some very inexplicable places so I don"t see my opponent"s point. In any case it is moot since we do now have GPS and even before we did the common man and government were limited to the same technology. My opponent says that in my point about painting a line that the government was interested in safety. How is any painted line less safe than none which is what they would have had otherwise? People prefer having something get done rather than having government busybodies doing nothing of substance. Historically many roads have been privately built and operated. The government wasn"t even able to keep up with it much of the time. The government does not have a vested interest in maintaining quality in roads, and in fact it may be politically advantageous to keep them in disrepair, this is not the case with private companies. Another problem is that tax money allocated to transportation can be diverted, this wouldn"t happen if the roads were paid for directly. Toll collecting in the end can be cheaper and easier to collect than taxes especially with new technology that can make such a transaction automatically. Roads could be managed the same way the market for food or any other commodity is in the market. [1] Thanks again and I look forward to the next and final round. 1 . http://www.fee.org...