From: hallam@zeus02.desy.de (Phill Hallam-Baker)
Subject: Re: Tolls on the federal highways!
Reply-To: Hallam@zeus02.desy.de
Organization: Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron, Experiment ZEUS bei HERA
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 07:39:27 GMT

In article <1992Dec11.135511.21767@njitgw.njit.edu>, aaron@funcity.njit.edu
(Aaron Watters) writes:

|>In article <randall.723869842@seashore> randall@informix.com (Randall Rhea)
|>writes:
|>>For those who believe that privitization is the way to go: name
|>>me ONE large public works project that was funded entirely
|>>by private industry....
|>
|>I think you could have asked the same question about telephone
|>systems a few years ago: ``Name one telephone system not operated
|>by a state designated regulated monopoly...''  Still, new technology made
|>greater competition possible.
|>
|>There are historical counterexamples, however.
|>The highway system in England was largely private
|>in the 1800's -- a system that worked reasonably well, I think,
|>since England had probably the best road systems in the world
|>at that time, which helped foster their dominance of the
|>industrial revolution.  Perhaps pay roads also
|>helped invigorate the development of alternatives like
|>rail in England earlier and faster than in other places (?).

Utter balls, the turnpikes were not private industry operating without
government interference they were local monopolies on transportation, bitterly
loathed by the peasant polpulation that the turnpike owners exploited. Ever
heard of the turnpike riots?

The initial introduction of turnpikes improved matters for people wanting to
move manufactured goods etc about. These people tended on the whole to be the
rich, who also happened to be the people who owned the turnpikes, who
incidentaly also tended to be the people who voted to set them up in the first
place. 

It didn't much matter to the pesants what the condition of the road was that
they drove their cattle/sheep along, at least not so much as to those who could
afford carriages. They still had to pay though.

England in the 1800's was not a libertarian Utopia, it was a society which was
loaded in favour of the rich at the expense of the poor. Ever heard of the
Manchester school of Capitalism?

The comming of canals and then of rail sent most of the turnpikes into
bankrupcy. The rail barons initialy loathed the idea of cheap mass transport,
only a government requirement to put on at least on train per day between
stations at a low cost gave access to the common man. These Parliamentary trains
are the ones refered to in the Mikado by the Lord High Excutioner. It was only
later that they grasped the concept of making money on low cost, high volume
transport.

Libertopia is fond of looking back to the 1800s as a golden age. They were no
such thing, they were a period in which the traditional social support systems
of the feudal system had collapsed and nothing had yet taken their place. The
rise of Socialism and the labour movement during this period must be seen in
this context. The system that the Libertopians praise is the one that spawned
Marxism and produced the Russian revolution. The people that had to live the
Libertopian nightmare strived for something better.

We are not going to go back to a system in which the only worth that society
puts on human life is their ecconomic productive capacity. We have come too far
to settle for anything so megre. The new-right libertarians are unable to come
to terms with the consequences of technology. Faced with a manufacturing sector
that has the capacity to eliminate the need for the vast majority of assembly
jobs they fix upon a social order founded in the protestant work ethic.

The major crisis in world markets is not lack of workers, it's lack of
resources, lack of consumers and gross mismanagement. Only the new-right
libertarian does not see disasters like Somalia as crises, they see them as the
natural and healthy effects of market forces.

The moral and philopsophical bankrupcy of new-right libertarians is seen by
their need to hide behind the name of a different, respectable set of values.
Socialist Libertarians such as myself uphold the right of the individual to both
political *and* ecconomic liberty, one without the other is worthless. What is
the use of freedom of speech to someone starving to death, or to someone who has
to surrender it to get a job?

The true motives of the new right in adopting the fig leaf title of
"libertarian" is apparent from their policies. At every point they seek to
abdicate the role of government in all socialy valuable areas to a mythical
entity called the "free" market. Like free quarks and free lunches the free
market may exist, however no evidence of it's existence has yet been
discovered.

--

Phill Hallam-Baker
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton