I'm just curious more than anything else. I think speed limits on highways and 'middle of nowhere' roads are just about the stupidest idea ever, but I can at least understand the intent of having them 'in town.'
I wonder if all roads were privately owned would the owners put speed limits on them? How exactly would that be enforced?
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No running in the mall.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power
We'll have to give it a try then, and find out.
They would if there were accidents. I'm sure a lot would right off the bat, though. It would be enforced however they desired. It wouldn't take long before the ideal system would be figured out.
I like speculating about these things. One idea that comes to my mind is that roads could be "speed-rated" by road-insurance companies. By that I mean a road-insurance company could inspect a road that it insures and give a rating of the maximum speed that they deem is safe to be driven on it. There'd probably be tonnage ratings on roads as well.
Speed ratings would do two things. First, they'd provide cut-off points for claims of negligence against road owners. The corollary to this is public posting of the speed ratings. Second, they'd help determine liability in car accidents on the roads. Here the corollary is that cars must somehow be monitored for speed. A few ways to accomplish this are: human observers ("road watchers"), cameras, and black boxes in the cars themselves.
As far as "enforcement" goes, there'd need to be a person somewhere in the loop for monitoring. This person could identify the car as it drives past (or review the automated observation). Either he or his superiors could report it to the insurance company registered with the car and/or its owner. Presumably the car-insurance company doesn't want to insure flagrant violators of speed limits.
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
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I lol'd
(english is not my native language, sorry for grammar.)
Sure, it is possible that there would be speed limits. But frankly I would expect to see stricter enforcement of no passing in the right hand lane, no talking on cell phones than speed limits per se. That and probably different types of drivers licenses.
I'dl ike to see road companies restrict people who are driving egregiously too fast. They could reprimand those types of irresponsible people because nobody would want to drive on a road with an unlimited speed limit. Companies that get carried away with "fining" people wouldn't last long and I'm sure they would be more leinient than the police who see it as a quick way to get money without a realistic appeals process, considering they are a coercive monopoly.
There would be no speed limits, and also no brakes.
I’d guess that most companies would give up any road regulation and just require all drivers to be insured at all times. Let those who can manage 150 mph go their merry way, without having to ‘pay’ for the inability of the rest of us.
On private roads, drivers who do not follow the policies and terms for use of the road could be trespassed by the road's owner.
On public thoroughfares, customary law would have to develop to regulate it. From Wikipedia:
The first speed limit legislation was created in the United Kingdom with the Locomotive Acts (automobiles were in those days termed “light locomotives”). The 1861 Act introduced a UK speed limit of 10 mph (16 km/h) which was then reduced to 4 mph (6 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3 km/h) in towns by the 1865 Act (the 'red flag act'). The first person to be convicted of speeding is believed to be Walter Arnold of East Peckham, Kent, who on 28 January 1896 was fined for speeding at 8 mph (13 km/h). He was fined 1 shilling plus costs.[7][8][9] Passage of the Locomotives on Highways Act 1896, which raised the speed limit to a "furious" pace of 14 mph is celebrated to this day by the annual London to Brighton Veteran Car Run.
I don't think this speed limit had anything to do with safety - sounds at first brush like it had a lot more to do with preventing automobiles ("light locomotives") from presenting competition to the Establishment's trains. Automotive speed limits have been around basically as long as automobiles have been around, so there has been no opportunity for customary law regarding operation of automobiles on public thoroughfares to emerge.
If I had to guess, I would say that a standard of "reasonable caution" would emerge. But then you have to ask what this means in terms of action. Of course, if there's a collision, you'll have a legal case against whoever was in the wrong. But it's absurd to suggest that no sort of driving activity can be lawfully censured no matter how reckless. There probably wouldn't be any traffic police on public thoroughfares. But what you could have is PDAs employed by commercial freight insurers to protect cargo vehicles or even "aggression insurers" that provide protection for individual travelers. These PDAs might keep armed vehicles on the road to be in a position to protect distressed drivers from reckless drivers. So, if you have a black Cadillac Escalade with gold rims swerving recklessly over the road, you could dial 911 on your cell phone (which translates to your PDA's emergency line) and have an armed vehicle vectored to your location. I can imagine vehicles that regularly travel public thoroughfares might have stronger front- and back-bumpers and possibly even side-bumpers.
A more serious problem than reckless drivers would be road blocks. Road blocks are common in poorer parts of the world. Some thugs park a van across the highway and wait for the next vehicle to come along. They pull whoever the next hapless victim is out of the car and fleece them for whatever they have of value, then escape.
Clayton -
Clayton:On public thoroughfares, customary law would have to develop to regulate it.
That, of course, presumes that public thoroughfares would exist. So what makes you think that they would?
Also, what do you think of my speculations? I'm curious.
I’d guess that most companies would give up any road regulation and just require all drivers to be insured at all times.
I don't think road companies would care if you are insured and I don't believe there would be any such thing as "liability insurance." The only kind of car insurance in a natural order society would be insurance against damage to the vehicle. The concept of being insured against liability is odious and socialistic. Hoppe has explained why.
Um, because there have always been public thoroughfares. You really think that every stretch of road in the New Mexico desert could be profitably owned and maintained by a private road company? I doubt it. Public thoroughfares would likely be un-maintained stretches of "use at your own risk" roads, as they were in the past.
You could be right but I think your ruminations would apply to high-end freeways more than the regular highways, country roads and city streets that make up the vast majority of road surface. Roads are insanely expensive to build so certain roads (i.e. interstates) would naturally exist in a pretty thin market, not unlike 19th century railroads.
I had an idea sometime back for a tent-enclosed freeway to provide protection from the elements for the vehicles and the road itself (no ice). It would be expensive to cover a road but not more expensive than the road surface itself and if you were building a German-style no-speed-limit Autobahn with very tight road surface tolerances, it might be profitable to build such a thing. Imagine 80K trucks running along at 120 mph. Of course, if the rail and road industries were privatized, rails would probably be a lot tougher competition and we probably wouldn't see as many heavy trucks on the freeways.
A guy walks onto my property under the condition he doesn't touch my stuff.
He touches my stuff.
I get my gun and tell him to leave.
Same thing works for roads.
This really is a question for markets to decide, as cliche as that sounds. There are certainly at least a couple of different logical ways this could pan out.
That said we are in custom and culture to think in terms of speed limits. If I was forced to bet on the issue, I would guess there would be speed limits similar to as we know them today, at least in the beginning.
I don't think road companies would care if you are insured and I don't believe there would be any such thing as "liability insurance." The only kind of car insurance in a natural order society would be insurance against damage to the vehicle. The concept of being insured against liability is odious and socialistic. Hoppe has explained why. Clayton -
Every risk that may be influenced by one's actions is therefore uninsurable; only what is not controllable through individual actions is insurable, and only if there are long-run frequency distributions.
I’d like to hear prof. Hoppe explain why than, do insurance people stare blankly at you in disbelief if you claim you have no experience rating in your premium. I’ve heard this fallacy so many times that I’m not even surprised anymore.
In contrast, take for example the risk of committing suicide. Would it be possible to insure oneself (to pool one's risk with others) against suicide? The answer should be quite obvious: such a thing is not a viable venture for an insurance company.
Well, surprise you can insure against suicide. Plus waht is this 'can't be done' attidude, and by a free-market economist. Anything can be done, some willy entrepreneur has just to figure out how.
Here is an example that begins to take us in the direction of the health insurance question: the risk of not feeling good in the morning and not getting out of bed. No insurer could ever cover such a "risk," because people do have at least some control over how they feel in the morning.
Yes they would, but you premium would fly off after two occurrences. Insurers offer anything if one is ready to pay the premium.
Assume that we could insure ourselves against not feeling well enough to get out of bed in the morning. You can easily see that this would create a class of malingerers and would discourage people from getting up, regardless of what their physical condition might be.
Who’d pay more in premium while other less. End of story.
To a large extent health insurance has become a form of welfare, the machinery of income redistribution. How has this happened? Insurance regulation.
In my own tiny Albania, we have no regulation of health care insurance, or of employers benefits regarding health care (I work in insurance regulation, I’d know) , yet I can walk 200 meters form where I sit now and I can find 3 Austrian insurers willing to insure my health fully. How’s that?
For someone who places such a huge (and well deserved) trust on insurance to ‘run’ an anarchic society, Hoppe surely knows little of it. Actually he would seem to have stayed with basically what Mises wrote back in the day. That insurance is a competitive industry that changes by the year, no one has noticed?
So trust me, liability can and, I believe, would be largely purchased in an anarchist society. I, for one, would allow no one in my property if no one guaranteed to pay for damages he could cause. I really cannot see how is any different from what credit card companies (indirectly insuring clients form their own default) or bonders do.
If you have driving experience, that places you in a different insurable class with other similarly experienced drivers.
Plus waht is this 'can't be done' attidude, and by a free-market economist. Anything can be done, some willy entrepreneur has just to figure out how.
Well, it's not so much "it can't be done" as it is that it isn't insurance. Liability "insurance" really exists but it's inaccurate to call it "insurance". It's just another form of socialism for the rich (it subsidizes drivers of expensive vehicles... think about it).
But what you're really talking about is a mutual aid association, not insurance. The Somalis actually have a mutual aid system where a group of 4 or 5 men who are members of the same clan share liability for each other's torts. Damages levied on any one member of the this mutual aid group can be collected on any and all of the members of that group. To call this "insurance" is, perhaps, true in a colloquial sense but in the technical sense, it can't be called insurance.
This is rating and is widely practiced. But what I meant was that if you’ve cost the company 10’000 dollars so far, your premium will jump by, say, 40%, no matter how experienced a driver you are. So your own actions, being careless while driving, driving drunk, do have a financial repercussion and you do have incentive to be careful. Every company does this where it can, because they all seek to eliminate ‘moral hazard’, which is what Hoppe is talking about.
Again, you assume that no matter how careless or careful, everyone would pay the same amount of premium. No company would do that without ending with all the maniacs and killers as clientele. Actuaries go to great lengths to find out what are you likely to cost the company in the future given how much you have cost already. It all depends on what you yourself do. In a sense you can imagine it as the insurer lending you money for you to pay for your blunders, and than you paying back with the increased premium.
True, the Somali system and countless others are mutuals, not insurance. But what I’m talking about is insurance. In a mutual all pay for John’s blunders, even if he’s a known serial killer. An insurer would charge him a million dollars a year for that. No one subsidizes him, he pays for himself in increased premiums. The ability to change price according to how likely are you to hit someone, based on your past experience, is what allows insurer to write risks that are even completely under the insurer’s control.
But what I meant was that if you’ve cost the company 10’000 dollars so far, your premium will jump by, say, 40%, no matter how experienced a driver you are.
Being involved in collisions (regardless of experience or fault) places you in a different insurable class with other individuals who have also been involved in collisions. I don't understand the details of how insurance companies handle this but the essence of the problem remains, as described by Dr. Hoppe, "Competition in the insurance market would lead to ever more-refined subgroupings of people into groups that are internally homogeneous." [Emphasis mine]
Amin to that. But that sentence flies in the face of his idea that no business where the insured has any control over the outcome could ever conceivably be insured. If people can be group into homogenous group, those tending to cause more damages too can be grouped together, and will end up paying more. Even to someone not versed in insurance, these two proposition should seem at odds.
Clayton:Um, because there have always been public thoroughfares. You really think that every stretch of road in the New Mexico desert could be profitably owned and maintained by a private road company? I doubt it. Public thoroughfares would likely be un-maintained stretches of "use at your own risk" roads, as they were in the past.
Why the implicit condescension (i.e. your use of "um")? Or am I reading too much into this?
Anyways, I'd suggest that the claim that public thoroughfares have allegedly always existed in no way means that they must or necessarily will always exist in the future. Now with that said, I will go on the record and say that, in the absence of government, I think all land and other natural resources will end up being homesteaded (and therefore owned) by people. The distribution of that ownership is irrelevant to me. But it does mean that I think all of the New Mexico desert, for example, will be owned by someone. Hence I think it's unlikely that there will be public thoroughfares.
If there's unowned land, however, then anyone and everyone can cross it at their own risk. However, I'd consider all of that land to be a "public thoroughfare", not just certain paths through it.
Clayton:You could be right but I think your ruminations would apply to high-end freeways more than the regular highways, country roads and city streets that make up the vast majority of road surface. Roads are insanely expensive to build so certain roads (i.e. interstates) would naturally exist in a pretty thin market, not unlike 19th century railroads.
Just out of curiosity, what makes roads so "insanely expensive" to build (and presumably also to maintain)? I don't have a whole lot of knowledge here, I'll admit.
On the other hand, I don't see how the expense of building/maintaining roads means they necessarily would not have speed limits of the kind I described. In fact, I'd say that regular highways and country roads would also have speed limits. City streets might even have them, but I'll have to do some more thinking there.
Clayton:I had an idea sometime back for a tent-enclosed freeway to provide protection from the elements for the vehicles and the road itself (no ice). It would be expensive to cover a road but not more expensive than the road surface itself and if you were building a German-style no-speed-limit Autobahn with very tight road surface tolerances, it might be profitable to build such a thing. Imagine 80K trucks running along at 120 mph. Of course, if the rail and road industries were privatized, rails would probably be a lot tougher competition and we probably wouldn't see as many heavy trucks on the freeways.
Very interesting idea. However, I think you're right about rails. And if the trains were supported by electricity, some (relatively) small amount of it could even go to the rails to keep them above freezing in the winter.
No, I didn't mean to be condescending. My only point is that it has never been the case that everything is owned and I think it's a pretty easy case to make that never will everything be owned (who will own the rights to sunlight incident to the Earth? or who will own the upper-atmosphere? or who will own satellite orbits? and so on?)
Anyways, I'd suggest that the claim that public thoroughfares have allegedly always existed in no way means that they must or necessarily will always exist in the future.
Actually, I think that if you think about privatizing government land, you inevitably run into this. In the Western US where I live, the vast majority of the land has been locked up as "public lands" (I think as much as 90% of Nevada is publicly "owned). If these lands were auctioned off to settle a US government default on its bonds, for example, some of the thoroughfares through those public lands would have to have easements granted since private citizens had been using those roads long before the lands were auctioned. Such easements would create unowned, public thoroughfares.
I'm not saying this will happen, I'm just giving one example of where it couldn't help but happen. And there's more. Consider if the government began privatizing all roads that it currently manages. Most roads could be sold as-is to for-profit toll road companies who would then recoup their money on the tolls from the road. But a great deal of roads out here in the West that are paved probably never should have been. We have forest roads that go off literally to nowhere and are paved... the only people who ever drive on them are Forest Service employees, hunters and naturists. No private entity could profitably maintain these roads, yet they are in use, so they cannot just be sold with the land. Hence, roads of this nature that fall into the "in use but cannot be profitably operated as a toll-road" would have to become public thoroughfares.
Hence I think it's unlikely that there will be public thoroughfares.
See above.
On the other hand, I don't see how the expense of building/maintaining roads means they necessarily would not have speed limits of the kind I described.
What's the point of a speed limit? "Don't go faster than this or else..." what? We'll trespass you from our roads? Doesn't that cause us to lose revenues? And the competition can just step in with a higher limit. Time is money - for-profit companies try not to force their customers to waste it. I don't think most highways would have any speed limit in a privatized road system. Intra-city highways might, certainly city streets would (since the city could easily profitably traffic-patrol the streets).
Clayton:No, I didn't mean to be condescending. My only point is that it has never been the case that everything is owned and I think it's a pretty easy case to make that never will everything be owned (who will own the rights to sunlight incident to the Earth? or who will own the upper-atmosphere? or who will own satellite orbits? and so on?)
Fair enough. I stand corrected.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to make the case that literally everything will be owned. Although you bring up some interesting questions. Forgive me if they're rhetorical, but I'd like to try to answer them.
Who will own the rights to sunlight incident to the Earth? Whoever homesteads the area on which they fall.
Who will own the upper atmosphere? Whoever homesteads paths through it.
Who will own satellite orbits? Whoever homesteads them.
Does that make sense?
Clayton:Actually, I think that if you think about privatizing government land, you inevitably run into this. In the Western US where I live, the vast majority of the land has been locked up as "public lands" (I think as much as 90% of Nevada is publicly "owned). If these lands were auctioned off to settle a US government default on its bonds, for example, some of the thoroughfares through those public lands would have to have easements granted since private citizens had been using those roads long before the lands were auctioned. Such easements would create unowned, public thoroughfares. I'm not saying this will happen, I'm just giving one example of where it couldn't help but happen. And there's more. Consider if the government began privatizing all roads that it currently manages. Most roads could be sold as-is to for-profit toll road companies who would then recoup their money on the tolls from the road. But a great deal of roads out here in the West that are paved probably never should have been. We have forest roads that go off literally to nowhere and are paved... the only people who ever drive on them are Forest Service employees, hunters and naturists. No private entity could profitably maintain these roads, yet they are in use, so they cannot just be sold with the land. Hence, roads of this nature that fall into the "in use but cannot be profitably operated as a toll-road" would have to become public thoroughfares.
I guess the question I have here is to whom the easments would go. My understanding of easements is that they are granted to individuals or firms. However, there would be no such firm as "the people of Nevada" in the absence of government there. So I'm not sure how an easement can be granted to "everyone" like that.
I agree with you that a lot of paved roads out West probably should've never been paved. In the absence of "universal easements", however, I'm not sure what would happen to them. Maybe they'd form boundaries between tracts of land. Or maybe they'd become recreational thoroughfares in parklands. Some of them would inevitably be closed to the public, however. The new landowners don't want trespassers, etc.
Also, I don't see why a road would have to be operated as a toll-road at all. I can see plenty of roads being subsidized by other ventures.
Clayton:What's the point of a speed limit? "Don't go faster than this or else..." what? We'll trespass you from our roads? Doesn't that cause us to lose revenues? And the competition can just step in with a higher limit. Time is money - for-profit companies try not to force their customers to waste it. I don't think most highways would have any speed limit in a privatized road system. Intra-city highways might, certainly city streets would (since the city could easily profitably traffic-patrol the streets).
Well, I guess I shouldn't have used "speed limit" there. I meant "speed rating", like I wrote in my initial post in this thread:
Autolykos:Speed ratings would do two things. First, they'd provide cut-off points for claims of negligence against road owners. The corollary to this is public posting of the speed ratings. Second, they'd help determine liability in car accidents on the roads. Here the corollary is that cars must somehow be monitored for speed. A few ways to accomplish this are: human observers ("road watchers"), cameras, and black boxes in the cars themselves. As far as "enforcement" goes, there'd need to be a person somewhere in the loop for monitoring. This person could identify the car as it drives past (or review the automated observation). Either he or his superiors could report it to the insurance company registered with the car and/or its owner. Presumably the car-insurance company doesn't want to insure flagrant violators of speed limits.
I still just generally object to this line of thinking as symptomatic of our immersion in a society where speed-limits have always been around. If the insurance company wants to know how fast you've been driving, why wouldn't they install a monitoring device right in the car?? The road owner surely wouldn't want to pay people to run around with radar guns... it just cuts into profits.
Think about it this way. Internet service providers sell bandwidth. They want you to be able to have as much bandwidth as possible for the price, so you will come to them over their competitors. This leads to a general upward pressure on bandwidth capacity. This is the trend everywhere in competitive markets... the most for your money. For-profit road operators would be selling accommodation for transportation. They would want their customers to be able to get from point A to point B as fast as possible. This would lead to competitive improvement of road surfaces and road technology to enable cars to be operated as close to their safe speed capacity as possible. The idea of speed limits is inherently statist.
Clayton:I still just generally object to this line of thinking as symptomatic of our immersion in a society where speed-limits have always been around. If the insurance company wants to know how fast you've been driving, why wouldn't they install a monitoring device right in the car?? The road owner surely wouldn't want to pay people to run around with radar guns... it just cuts into profits.
Please don't mistake me as an advocate for speed limits (or speed ratings) in this thread. I was merely speculating how they could still come about in a free-market society. Whether they would or should come about is a different matter, as far as I can tell.
Monitoring devices installed in cars by insurance companies is indeed one of the possibilities I mentioned:
Autolykos:Speed ratings would do two things. First, they'd provide cut-off points for claims of negligence against road owners. The corollary to this is public posting of the speed ratings. Second, they'd help determine liability in car accidents on the roads. Here the corollary is that cars must somehow be monitored for speed. A few ways to accomplish this are: human observers ("road watchers"), cameras, and black boxes in the cars themselves. [Emphasis added.]
However, while maximizing throughput/volume is always a good strategy in the abstract, it runs into barriers in reality. For example, the faster one travels, the greater the likelihood is that a collision (should one happen) will cause more damage. People, generally speaking, don't seem to want to be involved in collisions, especially severe ones. So they'll tend not to travel on roads that they perceive have a sufficiently (again, subjective to them) high likelihood of sufficiently (ibid.) severe collisions. One of the things that seems to affect that perception upwards is when people are travelling at highly disparate speeds on the same road.
Clayton:Think about it this way. Internet service providers sell bandwidth. They want you to be able to have as much bandwidth as possible for the price, so you will come to them over their competitors. This leads to a general upward pressure on bandwidth capacity. This is the trend everywhere in competitive markets... the most for your money. For-profit road operators would be selling accommodation for transportation. They would want their customers to be able to get from point A to point B as fast as possible. This would lead to competitive improvement of road surfaces and road technology to enable cars to be operated as close to their safe speed capacity as possible. The idea of speed limits is inherently statist.
Of course, I understand that competitive markets trend towards greater efficiency. However, getting from point A to point B as fast as possible still means actually getting there at all, if not also getting there unharmed. After all, how efficient is a road where you can travel at 200 miles per hour, but there's a 50% chance of a collision every 5 miles, and 90% of collisions are fatal?
My point is that there isn't one catch-all standard for efficiency. In the case of cars and roads, for example, there seem to be trade-offs between greater speed and greater safety. While "speed" can be defined objectively, however, it seems more difficult to pin down "safety" that way.
One can never know what the market will dictate unless it is allowed to exist. That being said, I suspect that speed limits would become obsolete if we ever had private roads, or at least significantly higher than they are today. Where I live, the City Council determines the speed limit not by judging the safety of the road but by conducting an annual census whereby the "new" speed limit is the 85th percentile of the speeds surveyed. This would seem to indicate that the true purpose of the speed limit is not to ensure safety but simply to give tickets to 15% of the population.
Some libertarians argue that in a propertarian society, private institutions would perform the same tasks that the state does currently. However, that merely concedes the argument to socialists that there is no contradiction in socialist calculation. Given the experiences that have occured without road central planning (see those towns in England and Holland where they eliminated traffic lights), I believe that private roads would not have speed limits or traffic lights or any idiotic prohibitions against texting or being slightly intoxicated.
Some libertarians argue that in a propertarian society, private institutions would perform the same tasks that the state does currently. However, that merely concedes the argument to socialists that there is no contradiction in socialist calculation.
QFT!
Possibly auto insurance companies would purchase roadways. They could incorporate the cost of maintenance and security into the price of the policy.Users then would be required to purchase their insurance to use the road or treated as trespassers
The insurance company would have a vested interest in posting safe speed limits and other safety measures they deem appropriate
The OP question assumes that there would be roads in an anarcho-capitalist. Does he not realize that the government is needed for roads exist? /sarcasm
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."