Well, naiveté is believing there are no options other than the one you are accustomed to or aware of. I’ll be happy to answer some of your questions and address your assertions though.
Where is the money to hire the construction company (and do the surrounding work going to come from?
Where does the money come from today? It comes from the taxpayer who purportedly use (some of) the roads. Well, if roads were to be privatized the money would come directly from those who also use the roads except they would be voluntarily paid for by actual consumers who patronize the roads. This could come in the form of tolls, subscriptions, HOA dues, private business funded, private owners, or even charitable organizations.
If necessity dictates a need for roads and infrastructure, then someone will supply the capital to obtain the private property and fund the project. Private business who build the roads today would simply be paid for by private entities rather than by the government and by doing so it would be more efficient because you have eliminated any third party effect which usually is a leaky bucket and leads to waste, fraud, and abuse.
“But the real question at this point is, WHO is going to do that negotiation in this situation?”
Again, how are large business deals negotiated today? What makes roads any different than large scale infrastructure projects? Private businesses would put together a management team for each step of the project and without government barriers to entry, they would merely work directly with those who would be affected in the construction. And if private citizens wanted to invest in building, let’s say a private local road, they merely would pay a third party consultant for exactly the job they wanted completed. Again, they are just pooling together the money and would not necessarily be doing the work when they don’t specialize in that line of work.
I’m not sure why roads seem so intimidating that private businesses run by the same people somehow would not have the capacity to manage without government bureaucrats running the show.
“Have you ever tried to get hundreds of people to do something? Even when they want to do it, it is a logistical nightmare.”
I believe you are looking at this as if citizens are just going to voluntary pay for roads out of their pockets in some mass collective effort. It does not need to be that complicated. Plus, you completely lost me trying to calculate their income. That also really has nothing to do with funding for private infrastructure.
Take airlines for example, there is a lot of heavy investment in paying for a fleet of planes and airport infrastructure but private companies put forth capital to pay for these things in order to receive a return on that investment in the form of profits down the road. Everyone that patronizes the airline does not invest in the formation of that airline up front. When the company goes into business, they will eventually pay back that investment slowly to its investors. A private road would operate in this same manner and could easily be paid for through tolls or a subscription service.
“Assuming of course that people bother with contracts because there isn’t anyone to enforce them anymore.”
I suppose you have never heard of private arbitration in legal settlements in which more and more companies are moving towards because litigation has become so expensive and time consuming. Without a contractual framework no one would do business with each other. So, of course there will be legal system without the government, especially when money is involved.
And just for the record, I believe the government does have some purpose in regards to actual criminal law, even though civil law could easily be privately handled more efficiently.
“Yeah, you’re not going to be paying for every one of these but check out how close those are clustered in some places.“
I’m sure I could dig up a map of every private business in California in relationship to each other to illustrate that even though it may appear complicated, in reality it is not that complicated in reality. Private entities would negotiate when their roads joined or crossed paths just like our complicated network of internet paths do today.
Also, more roads means more options for consumers which means more competition which in turn leads to more efficiency and lower costs. When you have two competing toll roads vying for your dollar, you win in the end. No one is claiming you have to pay for every road in your vicinity; just the ones you choose to use.
“You don’t HAVE to pay for any of that. You can just give all your neighbors the finger and keep your money. But for every person who does that, and there will be many, the likelihood that everything that needs to get done will get done drops. And eventually certain things just won’t get done.”
This is often called the “free-rider problem”, which I already covered before. Again, companies will have risk when investing in roads just like with any business, but ultimately they will be built and maintained based on the customers willing to use these roads. If no one is using the bridge to nowhere, then that business will end up closing and the bridge will be closed as a result. Today, our taxpayer dollars fund the investment of the bridge to nowhere and no one uses it and we all lose on that investment as a result.
“What it seems like to me is that people who are anti-government assume that their church circle is going to be the community model they’ll be dealing with.”
Well, I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I believe most issues are better handled at a local community level both privately and publicly speaking; so, it does make more sense for investment to be handled from the local level because they best understand how it will impact the citizens there even though they may not all necessarily agree.
By allowing voluntary transactions based on private property rights and profit incentives, you would satisfying most conflicts. The only outside negative consequences to some private infrastructure may be externalities caused by noise pollution or the loss of scenery to contend with. These still have today though can probably still be dealt with privately.
What’s important to note however is that by claiming that local communities are uncooperative and hateful to each other and thus incapable of working together, aren’t you making an broader argument that these competing views and beliefs makes one universal public good, such as a public road, even more difficult to accomplish at the government level? Yet, even local government eventually manages to pass these public projects despite competing views. Why would private ventures be any different? In fact, they mostly would be created by like-minded business owners who already agree in the onset.
“There are places in the world with next to no government. And you probably wouldn’t want to live in any of them.”
Actually, where are these places? I may be interested.
Usually, the opposite is true. Usually the poorest nations in the world have the largest centralized authoritarian form of government. A nation’s financial strength is a sign of its private economy; not so much its government, which does not really produce anything but misery to begin with.
