But who will repair the roads?

[Zoombie]

Originally Posted by Monkey

That either people should have the means to fix the roads themselves or they don't get roads?

I don't see why these things are mutually exclusive. I mean, the government can fix roads when it fixes roads, and when it doesn't, there shouldn't really be anything stopping from regular folks fixing the road. Right?

[Lyra Jean]

Where my mom used to live in South Carolina there was one neighbor who would grade the road with his grader. Then he would try and prevent people from using it. His logic was that since he maintained it it was his road.

Unfortunately for him it was the only road that led to the main road which was paved. So it was use the road or cut through his property. He would complain and I think he tried to post no trespassing signs but he still graded it.

[Monkey]

Originally Posted by Zoombie

I don't see why these things are mutually exclusive. I mean, the government can fix roads when it fixes roads, and when it doesn't, there shouldn't really be anything stopping from regular folks fixing the road. Right?

And that's pretty much what started this thread. Some regular folks fixed a road. Don said he's fixed roads, which is cool.

That's not illegal under our current system, but we also have systems in place that cover the times when citizens can't or don't unite to fix the roads themselves...which is the vast majority of times.

I'm not saying it has to be either/or. Those suggesting that because sometimes some people can fix some roads, the government should not be in the business of maintaining roads ARE saying it should be either/or.

Personally, I'd be extremely hesitant to drive on a large-scale bridge, or heck, even a decent-sized overpass if I knew the locals were just fixing it as they went, without necessarily any special knowledge or tools, and possibly without so much as oversight.

A hard pack dirt road, sure...but not all roads are so safe or easy to maintain.

[Manuel Royal]

Originally Posted by Don

Good luck with that. You're facing a case of negative feedback. The greater the taxes, the more people slip away to the underground, which means the remainder have to have their taxes raised, which means more slip away...

History indicates otherwise.

[DavidZahir]

Originally Posted by Monkey

And that's pretty much what started this thread. Some regular folks fixed a road. Don said he's fixed roads, which is cool.

That's not illegal under our current system, but we also have systems in place that cover the times when citizens can't or don't unite to fix the roads themselves...which is the vast majority of times.

I'm not saying it has to be either/or. Those suggesting that because sometimes some people can fix some roads, the government should not be in the business of maintaining roads ARE saying it should be either/or.

Personally, I'd be extremely hesitant to drive on a large-scale bridge, or heck, even a decent-sized overpass if I knew the locals were just fixing it as they went, without necessarily any special knowledge or tools, and possibly without so much as oversight.

A hard pack dirt road, sure...but not all roads are so safe or easy to maintain.

Thank you!

[muravyets]

Originally Posted by benbradley

Perhaps people might start to think it's not the road that needs certification, but rather the state.

Didn't something like that happen to a former governor before Schwarzenegger was elected? There's your precedent, right there.

Which makes it such an advantage working on the state construction crews - if someone then suffers injury due to shoddy construction, they don't sue the construction workers, they sue the state. Of course it's possible to win such a suit, but it's always an uphill battle proving the entity that makes the rules actually did something wrong.

Which is why I brought it up. The state won't get sued into oblivion, but the cul-de-sac of Libertarian Acres and all its residents could be easily bankrupted. No skin off my nose if they choose to run that risk. Live and learn, say I.

[muravyets]

Originally Posted by Mharvey

Very interesting find Don.

The road down the street from me has been in a demolished state for going on 6 months now. No one's working on it. Just shows how long it takes to get a state bureaucracy to get anything accomplished.



Well... there's always that too. However, I wouldn't doubt that the repairs probably turned out better than whoever the state would get as the lowest bidder to do it.

Really? Why?

[muravyets]

Originally Posted by Chrissy

Right. And fortunately, no one can sue the government for leaving the roads in such a state of disrepair that their livelihoods were being threatened.

That's the argument for exercising democracy to make the government fix the roads, not the argument for making yourselves the target of huge lawsuits.

[muravyets]

Originally Posted by Monkey

It's a unique situation.

Here you have multiple businesses (not individuals) that have resources such as manpower, money, equipment, and skilled labor at their disposal, and who stand to lose money if a major (but basically one-off) repair isn't completed.

So they complete it. It's great that they were able to do so.

The situation would be far different if we were talking a rural road whose inhabitants were largely poor, not skilled in this kind of construction, and didn't have the right kinds of heavy machinery. And face it: the poor are more often affected by things like roads washing out. We just don't hear about it so much.

I agree with DavidZahir's point: Just because something can work in a specific instance does not mean it will work over a broad spectrum of instances, and certainly doesn't mean that it would be consistently better than what we have now.

The situation would also be different in the case of a commercial thoroughfare in an urban center. Both your objection and mine show that the narrow band of ideal circumstances that allow an unusual situation to occur does not account for the broad base of social and human needs and circumstances. There was no way that even all the merchants associations along the length of Washington Street, which passes through several metro-Boston-area towns and cities and carries millions of vehicles daily, could possibly have repaired and resurfaced that whole street out of their own private financing. They wouldn't even have been able to manage the traffic or authorize detours, let alone pay for the cost of the work -- twice, since the last time it was done, nature forced it to be redone less than a year later. Thus, the fact that one group of merchants was able to effect a road repair in their immediate area in no way shows that government is unnecessary.

[DavidZahir]

Originally Posted by Don

Foreign Policy's not good enough for you? How about ABC News and Christine Amanpour, then? (If you get an error when the video is supposed to play, just click on the first icon in the scroll list below; it will start right up.)

Interesting links. But nowhere do I see the slightest real indication that government can never or should never do things like build roads. Or the weird Heinlienesque fantasies about negative feedback.

But then I've yet to see you remain on topic when challenged. You always veer into other subject matters, never really backing up the absurd claims you make about government, the economy or civilization in general.

Most egregiously, you take anecdotes and treat them as they were scientific experiments proving some fundamental law. In fact examples only show that the demonstrated behavior is within the range of the possible. Really, that is such a basic piece of logic! Like, really really BASIC!

[Don]

Originally Posted by Monkey

And when and where people are able to do that, it's great. People can do that, right now, and occasionally do.

Thing is, there's a lot of times and places where that's simply not an option. In those cases, they have little choice but to wait for the government to step in, even if it takes a while. Are you seriously arguing that things would be better if the government didn't step in at all in those instances? That either people should have the means to fix the roads themselves or they don't get roads?

Nope, people pay a lot of money to government for what they're supposed to get. I'm all for anybody getting back anything they can from the system.

However, with everybody from FedGov to local municipalities teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, America's infrastructure receiving an overall grade of "D" from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and only FedGov owing a printing press, I'd suggest people learn to do as much as they can for themselves.

[Jcomp]

Originally Posted by Bartholomew

People in government are people too

This seems like such an obvious statement, and yet it warrants quoting. It seems to get lost on some folks in discussions like this.

[Zoombie]

Frankly, I don't care who fixes the roads, just so that there are as few impediments in the fixing of them as possible.

[Jcomp]

Originally Posted by Zoombie

Frankly, I don't care who fixes the roads, just so that there are as few impediments in the fixing of them as possible.

I agree, with the addition that the roads be fixed safely by people who certifiably know what they're doing.

[Don]

Originally Posted by DavidZahir

Interesting links. But nowhere do I see the slightest real indication that government can never or should never do things like build roads. Or the weird Heinlienesque fantasies about negative feedback.

But then I've yet to see you remain on topic when challenged. You always veer into other subject matters, never really backing up the absurd claims you make about government, the economy or civilization in general.

Most egregiously, you take anecdotes and treat them as they were scientific experiments proving some fundamental law. In fact examples only show that the demonstrated behavior is within the range of the possible. Really, that is such a basic piece of logic! Like, really really BASIC!

I haven't once stated here that can never or should never do things like build roads. I have, however, pointed out that they're doing a poor job of the things they claim they can do for us.

As for the overall picture I'm presenting, it takes some BASIC synthesis to put it all together, something I've been working on for years. But lookit this quote from the first link:

In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.

The OECD estimates that by 2020, eight short years from now, that percentage will grow from half to two-thirds.

Then check out this part of the article:

A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank, the huge German commercial lender, suggested that people in the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and unregulated -- in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust System D -- fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned and tightly regulated nations.

As you dig deeper into the story, you'll find a coorelation between the restrictiveness of governments and the size of their "System D" or underground economy. The more hoops there are for to jump through, the more people decide to go around them, resulting in unregulated and untaxed market activity. And untaxed market activity means the government gets a smaller hunk of the economic activity in the country. There's your "weird Heinlienesque fantasy about negative feedback."

In light of that, take note that the Code of Federal Regulations totaled 165,494 pages as of the end of 2010, the most recent data according to the Office of the Federal Register. This is an increase of 132% from 71,224 pages in 1975. These regulations are enforced by more than 50 agencies, and a 2005 study by the Small Business Administration found that the cost of all these rules seven years ago was more than $1.1 trillion dollars a year, more than Americans paid in federal income taxes in 2009 -- and that's just at the Federal level.

As to how that impacts people taking care of infrastructure on their own where possible, tie that to this study from the American Society of Civil Engineers, where US infrastructure gets an overall grade of "D". They noted the need for $2.2 trillion in infrastructure investment over the next 5 years.

Then note that many states are going bankrupt, as are many cities, the economic recovery is lukewarm at best and non-existent in many ways, the Federal Government is running record deficits, is almost $16 trillion in the hole, and the Federal Reserve is now buying 61% of US debt.

And we haven't even mentioned the explosion in healthcare costs, the underfunding of Social Security and Medicare, the $1 trillion dollar student debt that's about 25% in arrears and about to implode, or the commercial real estate bubble that's soon to follow the path of the housing bubble.

Now tell me how you figure it all works out.

[DavidZahir]

Originally Posted by Jcomp

Originally Posted by Bartholomew
People in government are people too

This seems like such an obvious statement, and yet it warrants quoting. It seems to get lost on some folks in discussions like this.

Agreed.

[benbradley]

Originally Posted by muravyets

That's the argument for exercising democracy to make the government fix the roads, not the argument for making yourselves the target of huge lawsuits.

Perhaps I misread the story, but I thought they already did that.

But maybe they didn't try hard enough, maybe they just didn't have enough faith in government.

[Chrissy]

Originally Posted by Bartholomew

People in government are people too.

I agree, and I hope that when one hears an argument against government, it is understood that the argument isn't about the people working in government; it's about the system itself.

I'm reading a book which contains the following passage (feel free to debunk if it's inaccurate):

The federal government... is the nation's largest creditor, debtor, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider and pension guarantor.

The federal government is a system--an incredibly immense entity, like a corporation, but bigger and with more power than any public or private corporation in the country.

If the government were treated as just another corporation, I wonder how many of us would hire them to build and repair our roads, if we had the choice to seek out more efficient and more economical ways to get the job done.

[muravyets]

Originally Posted by benbradley

Perhaps I misread the story, but I thought they already did that.

But maybe they didn't try hard enough, maybe they just didn't have enough faith in government.

Yeah, maybe.

[SirOtter]

Originally Posted by Xelebes

Mind you, everything was done my pick, hammer, shovel and rake until the first graders started appearing in the 1900s.

Yes, because kindergartners are too small to wield such dangerous tools.

[Dommo]

Have fun doing this in any urban enivornment.

Here's the thing. You've got easements, utilities, buried fiber optics, drainage issues, EPA regulations, and a whole slew of other obstacles. A lot of this stuff takes a while for good reason, and it's because there are real liability issues tied up with public works.

If you start digging holes, and tearing up/resurfacing roads, but don't get the necessary wavers and surveys done, then there's a good chance you're going to damage someone else's shit. Have you guys ever seen how much it costs to repair a large fiber optic cable? It ain't cheap.

In a rural environment, I can understand fixing your own/local roads, because in a lot of cases rural counties have difficulty paying for road repairs, but if its built up, you better watch out.

[thothguard51]

Back when we had Snowmageddon, a local guy got arrested and almost put in the poky for plowing a state maintained road. He brought out his heavy construction equipment and removed the snow from 2 miles of roadway in one day, the day after the storm. Its a very rural area and last on the states list to plow...

The state's claim was that they can not have unauthorized civilians plowing the roads because of the possible damage they cause and possible lawsuits that may follow. There was also the claim that he did not dispose of the snow properly and they feared flooding. Which never happened.

At his court hearing, his neighbors all came to rally to his defense and the judge threw the case out as frivolous considering the circumstances. But the judge did warn the guy not to do something like this again...

[kuwisdelu]

[kuwisdelu]

Originally Posted by Dommo

Have you guys ever seen how much it costs to repair a large fiber optic cable? It ain't cheap.

Don't you fucking mess with my apartment complex's fiber.

[Celia Cyanide]

Originally Posted by Don

The roads might actually get fixed?

Then why isn't it happening now? Like, everywhere?