RussNelson wrote:neroden wrote:until you rediscover the reasons why money is government-sponsored. Transportation is government-sponsored for similarly sound *network effect* reasons, and so is the Internet.
Depressingly ignorant you are, sir.
Depressingly ignorant you are, sir. I guess I do have to explain it all since you didn't bother to look any of it up. Here's the short version. The amount of money in circulation is a function of the creation of short-term IOUs by all manner of institutions, but the supply of tradable short-term loans which act as money equivalents has been kept under tight government control, getting tighter for most of history since the start of the industrial revolution, because if you don't, you get financial crises. Like the one we had two years ago. Banks are government-licensed operations regulated within an inch of their lives for a very good reason -- they're subject to bank runs, and are capable of destabilizing the entire industrial system both by overextending credit and by underextending credit. (This is a form of network effect.) In a society with a high percentage of subsistence agriculture, the deleterious effects of banks which are not essentially government-backed are tolerable. In a modern society, they're not, which is why all our banks are government-licensed, government-guaranteed (FDIC), and have the details of their business operations specified by the government (capital requirements, reserve requirements, etc. etc.) Removal of some of these regulations in the mid-90s was disastrous ten years later, and the result was an admission that even nominally not-government-backed banks were government-backed.
Most of the rest of your nonsense was debunked by other posters.
Transportation is just one example of linear infrastructure (think wires and pipes also).
Only thing you have right. These are all quintessential public goods, *with* rights thickets *and* network effects, and therefore quite easy to supply in a unified government-controlled situation, and completely impossible to supply in a laissez-faire situation. There's a reason the Roman government built roads and then there were very few good roads built in Europe during the entire fragmented feudal period.
And it's specifically the roads or tracks which have this characteristic, not the vehicles, which is why the English "privatization" worked tolerably once the rails went back into public hands. Transportation networks extending beyond the domain of a single overlord are practically impossible to build due to a "rights thicket", the problem of needing to get permission from every single person along the route. In this country, the single overlord is government. Usually.
It's better when it's a democratically elected government. When it isn't, the network effects often lead to a private monopoly which is responsive to no-one. Think pre-breakup AT&T (which is frankly reforming).