But the internet you use. The roads you use. The courts you rely on for enforcing contracts the GPS network that makes location based business models even possible come from those grants and basic research.
If we ever have self driving cars it will be because DARPA -a government agency— hosted competitions in the desert with million dollar cash prizes just for college students to compete to have fun building self driving humvees; at the time no one thought it would be commercially viable.
Basic research is very important, but you are overstating it's importance vs the development work to get it from there to market. That's the hard, and resource intensive, part, and is usually done by the private sector. For example, not much that SpaceX has done is new idea. They have just been the first to execute, and that is where almost all of the market value is.
I am pointing out that the free market won’t invest in the first foundational research specifically because it isn’t yet viable. Government is the only social actor that can fill the void.
SpaceX is not the first to act. Government was. SpaceX wouldn’t be viable now without government contracts so that example is not persuasive.
That article is ridiculous. Do you know how expensive it is to pave a road? I had to pave a small parking lot (15 spaces) for a building I own and it was $20k. It’s one think for a person to build a 400meter road it’s another for a person or company to build a network of roads. So this cute anecdote is entirely irrelevant especially when you consider that broadly over history there are no examples of road network built without governments leadership.
> Enter Mike Watts and his wife, who decided to build a road only 400 meters long to get around the landslide. They put a 2-pound toll on it. The road was built in 10 days.
> And it’s working. People are using it and it’s bringing in substantial revenue.
This is what people parody when they mock radical economic libertarianism. Roads are (arguably) a public good. They shouldn't bring in "substantial revenue", otherwise only the richest areas will get them. I appreciate the failure of bureaucracy to fix the detour here, but this just isn't a response to the problem of societal infrastructure without taxation.
People in remote areas would have an incentive to invest in their own roads or perhaps use the same funds to innovate with other modes of transport.
If overall the costs are lower than taxation, it stands to reason that someone would invest time or money in solving the problem.
I'm not necessarily an absolutist, but if we're discussing the principles involved, observing the increased costs and often lower quality of state infrastructure isn't enough. The problem and key distinction for proponents of liberty is being violently coerced into paying for these services.
Even if you can make the argument that there might be potentially underserved areas, can you justify the use of force? If so, can you say that with a purely state run road system, there will be no underserved areas?
Getting back to the rejection of absolutism, I'm not convinced either system will be perfect. Both have trade offs. We live in an imperfect world. Utopia isn't a practical comparison.
If I'm living paycheck-to-paycheck in a generally poor area, I likely don't have the money to invest in roads near me, which means the roads near me are not maintained and deteriorate in quality, which means I have fewer opportunities to earn money, and so the cycle continues. I understand there's an incentive to invest in infrastructure, but if you're in a very poor area, you don't have that money to invest in the first place. If I have the money to invest in roads near me, surely I'm even more incentivised to use that money to move elsewhere, where people are already paying for the roads?
The costs of building roads overall may work out lower than taxation, but if you're in an area where on average people are in the minimum tax bracket, it will likely work out higher for you. This comes at the expense of those who earn more ofc, and I guess that's where we differ in perspective.
My personal perspective would entail that someone born into an impoverished area should have the opportunities to succeed, and (ideally) taxation can at least ensure they have the infrastructure around them to do so. It's difficult for me to consider a society as one that ensures everyone's liberty, if some people are massively disempowered by society by luck of birth.
> someone born into an impoverished area should have the opportunities to succeed, and (ideally) taxation can at least ensure they have the infrastructure around them to do so.
Taxation can do this, but that does not mean it's the only way to do it.
As I see it, we as citizens of a free society who want to give equal opportunity as much as humanly possible, have two choices for how to do that:
(1) Coordinate it with a government;
(2) Coordinate it with private entities.
Unfortunately, neither of these choices works very well.
The problem with #1 is that it never stops with just enabling equal opportunity. Yes, the government builds roads and other infrastructure. But the same power we give it to do those good things, it also uses to do lots of things that are at best wasteful and at worst actively harmful. There's no way to have a government that only does good things with our tax money.
The problem with #2 is that it's like herding cats. Most people want infrastructure in the abstract, or want it if it already exists, but don't want to actually do the work required to create it, even to the extent of participating in community discussions about it. They just want it to happen somehow.
However, the failure modes of these two choices are also very different:
With #1, the failure mode is for government to keep expanding and expanding, taking more and more power, and putting more and more restrictions on people's freedoms. The end state of that is tyranny for everyone.
With #2, the failure mode is less equality of opportunity, or at least more difficulty in pursuing opportunities for people born into less fortunate circumstances. But there are many ways to compensate for this. Even if the fraction of more fortunate people who will do actual work to help less fortunate people is small, technology can give them leverage. As long as people have freedom, they will use it.
Libertarians do not advocate #2 over #1 because they think it works great. They advocate it because it is less bad in terms of failure modes than #1.
But the costs aren’t lower than taxation if that tax base is hyper local as you imply. Part of the benefit of National infrastructure and national taxation is specifically because it spreads the cost over a much larger pool of payers so the individual cost is minimal while at the same time creating a massive national market that is more than the sum of the parts.
Read about the early economic history of the US. How hard it was to conduct commerce when you couldn’t get goods to or from a market because there were bad roads. You can dismiss government all you want but when Roman government administration was good, roads were built. Not so much in the dark ages.
If we ever have self driving cars it will be because DARPA -a government agency— hosted competitions in the desert with million dollar cash prizes just for college students to compete to have fun building self driving humvees; at the time no one thought it would be commercially viable.