California is what, the world’s sixth largest economy? But we (our political leadership broadly speaking) seem quite inept despite their abundant resources. Gotta to spend dollars on campaigning and gerrymandering instead, or you know losing 50 billion here and there to EDD fraud, or on high speed rail from Visalia to Modesto.
Federal taxes paid by California’s residents and businesses subsidize the budgets of the states who have made retaliatory gerrymandering efforts necessary. Spending money on Prop 50 is rational because California is on the verge of a durable situation of taxation without representation.
This same phenomenon shows why California will struggle to replace the federal government for funding basic research.
It never ceases to baffle my why Californians tend to opine towards a strong federal government when the documents authorizing it are structured such that California is virtually guaranteed to get the worst end of the deal. California has 12% of the population and 2% of the senators.
Every time Californians urge to give the federal government more power, even for "good" things, the rules of the game virtually demand it will be used against them. This might be a necessary evil for the bare minimums (military protection, federal court to settle contracts, enforcement of some federal laws), but I don't understand how Californians justify that every positive intention will be turned against them and carry on anyway.
Well, now that taker states have figured out how to hack the system and bleed giver states while doing things such as neutering the EPA without facing electoral consequences, attitudes seem to be changing amongst people who previously were all right with subsidizing taker states on humanitarian grounds.
This is something baked into the constitution from the beginning.
The entire reason we have the senate is because the less populated slave states didn't want to get steam rolled by the the more populated northern free states. It was an anti-democracy measure to ensure low population regions get over-represented.
It's perverse that the compromise isn't named for the states who were denying suffrage to enslaved people but who wanted to claim them as population for the purposes of representation.
And that is part of the reason why the 10th amendment left many/most the functions the feds are currently performing to the states, and barred the feds from performing them.
i.e. California for a very long time, and even on rare occasion today, is constantly harassed by the DEA over intrastate commerce of marijuana despite the federal government having no power to do so. Californians were basically made to fund the extra-constitutional enforcement against them voted for by other states with per-capita outsized votes.
Since the US Civil War, it has been the feds forcing the ex-slave states into granting representation for their minority populations. States don’t have the power to force fair elections in other states without the feds — so the appreciation for the feds is understandable among those who believe in equal representation.
Sclerotic severe gerrymandering of every seat in the House of Representatives, enabled by the Roberts Court, though, is new.
The voting population difference was massive. The entire reason for the 3/5ths compromise was because the slave states would have almost no house representation.
Adding up the 1780 numbers on that page, the numbers appear to be almost identical. But there's a catch: those numbers include enslaved people. who numbered at least 500,000 (see [1]).
The problem with representatives happened as a result of the Reapportionment Act of 1929 [1], which capped the house at 435 members.
tl;dr: the Republican party recognized that demographic shifts were going to make them a permanent minority in the House, so they refused to re-apportion the number of house members after the 1920 census, then in 1929 decided to cap the number of representatives permanently.
The simple fix is to repeal the law and apportion seats properly, likely by significantly growing the size of the House.
However, in typical Democrat fashion, they never bothered repealing the act and re-apportioning properly once they had power to do so.
The hsr hyperbole is pretty tired at this point. Turns out when you build a train between LA and SF serving a region in between that will have 15 million people in 40 years is pragmatic.
We could all band together and have another dedicated group collect money for it. It wouldn't be optional, either, because we mostly all agree it's valuable. Of course, there would have to be yet another group that sets how much money to collect, and how to spend it.
Oooh I love this idea. We could have some sort of process where everyone gets a say in deciding how the money is spent. Except maybe rather than everyone doing that you could have instead people whose job it is to do it, and everyone gets a say in deciding who those people are.
I wonder if this sort of thing has ever been tried.
It was tried once. Unfortunately it was ultimately killed off by a corrupt leader who took over the military and started deploying them the cities to stop crime. That leader ultimately strong armed the other elected officials into doing his bidding leading to the destruction of the once great nation. He ignored the law and the will of the people.
He was ultimately assassinated in 44BC. I believe his name was Julius Caesar.
To be fair Ceasar was replaced by a few even more oppressive wannabe tyrants. He never posted lists of his political enemies to be murdered and was generally pretty lenient.
Probably led to his downfall. Augustus made sure to squash all potential sources of opposition before taking over.
For sure. Julius ultimately just paved the way for the future tyrants. He consolidated the power into himself which made it a lot easier for his predecessors to take things further.
I understood what you meant, but the word you were looking for is "successors", not "predecessors". His predecessors were the senate, consuls, and the rest of the governing bodies of the republic.
Another thing is that I’m not sure he really ignored the will of the people. “The people” were severely oppressed and the policies they supported ignored and rejected for the past 80+ years by the tightly knit oligarchy at the top. The overwhelming majority of its citizens probably had no real reasons to do anything to “protect” the republic.
Also it’s not like Caesar was the first to do what he did. He followed in the steps of a much more brutal and oppressive conservative/reactionary tyrant who almost had him executed a few decades ago.
I suspect we'll end up with a patchwork: From activist private organizations / charities. To state gov'ts in blue states. To just private industry (given how solar is now the least expensive energy source). To just private citizens who would prefer to work for less money on something valuable than squeeze a tiny bit more profit as a corporate cog.
Ideally the Federal gov't gets back into play, but we shouldn't plan for that future. It's a nice to have, but its a single point of failure. Especially if the Supreme Court doesn't believe in the independence of agencies anymore.
As an example, the American Academy of Pediatrics now has their own vaccine schedule, which they didn't have before. Nobody in their right mind trusts the CDC / FDA on this right now.
Even if they paid private enterprises and didn't donate, they could recreate much of government functions, this time not under a monopoly with a captive buyer. I presume many people would want many of those services even if they chose to buy rather than donate them.
You tried that with healthcare. Turns out lots of people want to buy it, it just costs a large multiple of what everyone else in the world pay because actually a bunch of private sector middlemen doing the same adminstrative roles the government does isn't automatically more efficient.
We did not try eliminating government from healthcare. In fact many of the high cost of private payments arise from regulation or a tragedy of the commons situation introduced by government (i.e. ER required to take everyone but with no answer how to pay).
Even if we just let the pesky poors die, the US healthcare system would still be more expensive on a per use basis than the rest of the world.
Now sure, the absolute amount spent would probably be lower if we just assumed that people that couldn't produce paperwork to prove they could fund their ER visit didn't deserve to live. If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need lifesaving treatment they can't afford, that's a perfectly valid preference. It's just intellectually dishonest to frame an argument that it's inefficient to let poor people live as an argument everyone would get more care if it wasn't for the pesky government paying for it.
Wait which is it. We have a "private" system where we save "the pesky" poor and regulate licensing, insurance, provide medicare/medicaid, have a quasi-public system for ER where private payers fund those who won't pay, or we don't? You just switched entirely to some soap box about why we actually do have a bastardized private-public system and then damned me for pointing out the very false basis that you presumed because it was "intellectually dishonest" for me to point out your argument was intellectually dishonest.
Your premise was we have some kind of private system; my thesis is the uncovered poor would be better off with that than whatever it is we have now where they can maybe go to the ER "free" but otherwise pay a gazillion dollars in regulatory and other imposed costs if they actually try to get some prophylaxis.
If you want to say universal healthcare could be better than whatever we have now -- sure I won't disagree with that. Right now we have about the worst imaginable public-private bastardized system replete with deep regulatory capture.
>If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need lifesaving treatment they can't afford, that's a perfectly valid preference
... this is not my thesis at all, as you're relying on "can't afford" being at the level it is now where the poor are being billed for all manner of things they wouldn't be in an actually private free market and you're also relying an an absurd premise there will be no charity or any other options for them. For instance, in the Philippines I could just walk into a private pharmacy and buy penicillin essentially no questions asked to treat strep throat on the private market for ~half a day's local wages. (Yes Philippines have public healthcare and hospitals but you're not gonna get that meaningfully in some rural barangay). In USA it takes me 1-2 days wages to treat strep throat because I must go to a doctor to write me magic piece of paper that say I will not go in a cage for having a prescription drug, pay all his regulatory overhead, pay regulatory overhead for a lab, then go to a highly regulated pharmacist and then buy my antibiotics from probably the highest-barrier industry in the US through an anointed company and supply chain blessed by the government. I am much better off having cheap, but non-free antibiotics to treat strep than having to wait until it becomes Scarlet Fever and going to the ER for "free" or being taxed into oblivion to get "free" antibiotics that are then administered in the most bloated and uncompetitive way by government to the point I give up other necessities to pay the tax.
> Wait which is it. We have a "private" system where we save "the pesky" poor and regulate licensing, insurance, provide medicare/medicaid, have a quasi-public system for ER where private payers fund those who won't pay, or we don't?
You have the fully private provision you insist is more efficient. It costs more for worse outcomes than every other developed country, who also have regulations. If your original claim that the private sector is so efficient it could deliver everything for a third of the tax cost of the current system, it's remarkable that you're actually paying a large multiple the cost of the fully socialised systems for many people to have no care or crippling copays.
Sure, you can move the goalposts by claiming that true private provision requires there to be no medical regulations. But in order for that claim to be remotely credible you'd have to be able to point to all the countries that have great outcomes from having no medical regulations or public healthcare at all (the Philippines where the government is the main provider of healthcare but it doesn't have the time or inclination to enforce regulations on OTC antibiotics doesn't count, even if its health
outcomes were excellent, which they're unsurprisingly not). Not gonna lie, if I'm suffering from the symptoms of a heart attack, I don't think antibiotics for half a day's pay are going to help, and literally the only efficiency argument for restrictions on ER rooms being allowed to employ extra admin staff to check insurance paperwork before deciding to administer treatment being an efficiency loss is that it's more efficient to let me die if I can't pay. As I've said, common argument but the complete opposite of your original setup where everyone gets the same outcomes for a third of the cost.
It's an extremely strong indication you've no experience with the US ER system that you think the efficiency issues are checking insurance at the door of a MI patient vs the fact they're required to at least entertain the hordes of people coming in with self reported "STD" or "doctor note for flu" when that kind of stuff shouldn't be appearing at the ER unless a lower acuity clinic has suspicion it might actually require emergent care. But of course why go to a clinic that is much cheaper when you can just show up at the ER and claim the pseudonym Pedro Sanchez with no ID and let the clinic bill it to all the other patients (which you insanely claim makes our system 'private' despite the fact all this happens at the behest of government), whom of course won't show up unless they're about dead because they not only will have to pay for these abuses but actually having something to lose. [Oh and how would I know this, only working ~1 yr in an inner city ER and seeing all the cases]
And you can argue that it would be better if those patients could get free urgent care instead of free ER to do the same thing at way higher cost, and I would agree that would be better than what we have now. But either way we're at an entirely different starting point.
What you can't argue is we actually have a private system in the US (and somehow miss the elephant in the room that over 1/3 of healthcare spending in the US is public Medicare/Medicaid, then add VA on top that) and then allude it's no true Scotsman or a moved goalpost if I point this out. In fact every time I do point it out, you just go back to morally proselytizing about dead poor people because it's a great way to distract from the fact you've lied and knowingly lied.
I mean, if we're in agreement that it'd be more efficient to have socialized healthcare than the non-socialized healthcare the US has, I'm not sure why you started off with the insistence that the private and charitable sector made everything so much more efficient it could provide all the actual benefits of the US government for a third of the cost.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't private hospitals entirely free not to accept EMTALA patients if they also choose not to accept Medicare funding? And that some do, and remarkably still manage to be significantly more expensive than the rest of the world. Weird all these profit making companies opting in to accepting the regulation though, if it's that big a burden.
Like I said, if it was easy to do so much better than socialized healthcare simply by abolishing regulations on the private sector (which itself is a different discussion entirely from whether private companies are intrinsically more efficient), it's surprising nobody seems to have achieved this, anywhere. The true purely private healthcare system that delivers the same or better health outcomes at lower cost doesn't exist.
I've never claimed I thought totally private healthcare might be 1/3 the cost of universal healthcare. I postulated the functions of our government as currently implemented might be able to achieve for 1/3 the cost if privatized. You invented some straw-man that argued I was arguing vs something else, something our government isn't even offering, so I'm unsure how you even got to the point you got to.
If you truly thought our health care was privatized it's all a moot point, because it wouldn't have been included in our original argument. In either case your point is moot because I never compared to hypothetical socialized healthcare but rather our current entire government system.
It blows my mind you would even use the "1/3" statement if you thought it was private because if it was private it wouldn't have even been in the subset of stuff I was comparing relative cost to. I never claimed private things would cost 1/3 the price of things already "private."
Paying for the inefficiencies of private healthcare is about half of US govt spend on providing services (the only larger spend is transfer payments, and you can't pay $4b in annuities to senior citizens from a private insurance scheme that takes in significantly less than that. So probably you need to cut healthcare by more than a third...). I actually believe the US could stay safe on a much lower military budget (though god knows what a private donor funded military would look like) but that's not getting the overall budget cut by a third even if you zero it out.
Mathematically impossible to achieve the functions of the US government for a third of the cost without cutting healthcare spend. Which has been demonstrated to be entirely possible by other countries, but only by choosing to let more people die or, ironically, removing some of the dependence on inefficient private companies for provision...
Obviously a lot of things can work more smoothly when people are willing to give away value for free.
Obviously people are a lot more willing to give away value when it costs them virtually nothing (like roads in a rural area with definitionally extremely low traffic)
Somehow when the county maintains them, the "virtually free" roads somehow become enormously expensive.
You can see the government having a monopoly and captive buyer causes them to be horribly inefficient, as they have no competition (and no private competitor will emerge when the price at point of use by their competitor is zero).
Or do you mean people can't try this out in areas that have already been developed by generations' worth of other people's private and public investments?
In places where there are already public roads, private roads cannot generally compete because the price at point of use is $0 and the maintenance cost are sunk.
Imagine for a moment I had a private school that was equal in all ways to a nearby public school including cost. People would say "why I already paid taxes for the public school, why would I go there and then have to pay yet again." No one would go to the private school. Whereas if they were not made to pay the taxes, they'd be about as equally likely to go to the private school as the public one, and the overall costs would be same.
It is very difficult to establish a robust private road system in a place with public roads. The public views the public road as an established asset rather than the reality (they are an ongoing subscription of maintenance costs). The costs are invisible to the public, even if they might be worse, they just see the road as "free" when they drive on it. This means the public can end up spending even more money with worse results than use of private roads, but be stuck in a local minima they will never escape from.
I build a private interstate next to a public interstate.
Lets say it costs me $0.20 / mi per honda civic that travels on it, and the public road costs $0.30 / mi per honda civic that travels on it in amortized costs.
At the point of use, the user sees my toll of say, $.25 / mi with some profit, and at point of use the user sees $0.00 for the public highway.
Who on earth would bother to take my toll road, even though it is more efficient and cheaper? They've already paid the tax, and not only that, it is largely invisible to them. The government will literally imprison them or take their shit if they don't pay it, it is a sunk cost, the government has violently usurped my competition via payment under threat of violence.
You can't compete with 'free' at the point of use enforced by a violent actor against a sunk cost. Yes if you buy a plot of land that appears to not even be accessible by vehicle without some kind of unknown corner-crossing easement (one linked), then you will win out vs the non-existent competition there, but of course if the government shows up and taxes you to build a road even then you would lose.
>Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.
No I'm talking about using infrastructure a private entity has paid for as competition.
Would you call it "unencumbered" competition if I started stealing a few bucks from everybody that goes to the gas station, then paid people to take my road with the ill-gotten gains instead of the public interstate, then declared that the government is free to compete unencumbered? Of course you wouldn't, I can't just take money from everyone at the gas pump, but the government can so that their public "toll" is already paid and I can't compete even if my road is cheaper.
The end result is public roads have a mobster-type clamp on the encumbered market. You can't compete with them because they have a monopoly on violence and use it to prepay the toll to game the price at the point of use.
>but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road?
Mine, where I live the roads for miles and miles are all private with public easements and are privately funded. Of course by your definition that would make the public road illegitimate, because it has unfairly poached a private road user (not sure I agree with that).
>What's at the end of those miles and miles of privately funded roads?
Sometimes other private roads, sometimes private property/houses, sometimes public roads. Sometimes people travel exclusively on private roads, sometimes not. I don't understand your point here, a private road isn't allowed to connect to a public road but a public road is allowed to connect to a private road? It doesn't pass any sort of symmetrical test.
>Separately, how do you handle it when a neighbor decides to neglect their portion of a road?
If they neglect their road they can't go buy groceries or use their property. So it is extremely rare, as they're basically forced to do it out of practicality, they would be hurting themselves more than anyone else. Down to the point it's well within the tolerable amount of charity. Usually some retired person comes along with a backhoe because they have nothing else to do, and until then the roads are large gridded so the roads never become impassable. In practice your concern hasn't become a problem in my years of living on private roads.
No, my point is that presumably the cars arrived on your self-sufficient private roads via public roads. Is this correct or not?
Re maintenance: Again, obviously doesn't work outside of an area that definitionally does not have very few people/businesses.
If everyone lived in density like yours, first of all we wouldn't have nearly anything good about modern life, but secondly yes we could obviously have the system you describe. I'll take public roads and modern life any day.
>No, my point is that presumably the cars arrived on your self-sufficient private roads via public roads. Is this correct or not?
Sometimes yes sometimes no.
>If everyone lived in density like yours, first of all we wouldn't have nearly anything good about modern life, but secondly yes we could obviously have the system you describe. I'll take public roads and modern life any day.
I'd say high density public roads are causing a big problems for cities. Cars are subsidized in a way that distorts the market to overrepresent car travel over private mass transit or other more efficient alternatives. I believe our cities would be much safer and more enjoyable, without losing access to needed goods, if the roads were all privatized.
I don't believe you can 'solve' the tragedy of the commons by increasing the size of the commons. Public government is a tragedy of the commons and shrinking it as close to, if not to the size zero, would reduce not increase the tragedy of the commons.
I'm not opposed to say, privatizing many functions of government so that they are no longer commons. I feel this would solve that problem better than making the commons larger.
Let's start off with the first point "They are just easements on private property" That's what most public roads are. They are still owned by the public (the government) and maintained by the public (the government). Where I'm from, we have plenty of dirt and gravel roads just like this. Once every 10 years or so the county comes in and re-gravels them. They are mostly only ever used by private individuals and they cross through private land, but they are ultimately public. There are actual dirt roads which are also publicly owned but unmaintained.
Where there are private roads, they've been an absolutely nightmare. What's happened with private roads is rich individuals tend to like to throw up gates and no trespassing signs on the roads. Particularly if it blocks off public land, which they don't own, and turns it into their playground. That happens all over the country. In particular you'll see it happen to lakes an on beaches all the time.
But finally, you benefit from the public road whether you want to admit it or not. And particularly when population density goes up, public roads become much MUCH more important. The model you propose is one that only works if we are in very rural locations. It completely breaks down as soon as you need to get goods into a grocery store or supermarket. We subsidize with our taxes the damage done to roads by shipping products and goods. Because I like eating fresh fruit and vegetables, I don't mind that I'm paying a little more taxes so I can have access to those goods. Along with amazon shipments and my mail.
There's a reason no ideal libertarian society exists, because they go to shit when they are tried (see Argentina who is currently looking for a bailout from the US because of their dumb economic policies that you likely support). There are plenty of failed "free town" experiments. The book "A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear" is an amusing story about exactly how this system ultimately turns into a trash heap city.
Honestly I will just thank my lucky stars most people believe this fiction you present, because it's keeping the more libertarian areas cheap and without too many busybodies. It seems you've not heard of public access private easements or private trash service, and you haven't learned how to shoot a bear.
I pay like $50/month in property taxes and that's basically exclusively for public school and college, which while I'm not thrilled to be paying anything above $0 at least basic education has a massively positive ROI.
We don't have any sort of effective police/fire presence, public roads, any public utilities, or really any government services besides grade school education and it's been that way for 50+ years without any sort of apocalypse or us all being eaten by bears. Which is amazing because I don't have to worry about some asshole coming along to choke me out on the pavement were it I would have the bad judgement to sell a loose untaxed cigarette.
So far the place hasn't turned into a trash heap, and I've gotten the services I used to get by public services in other areas for 1/3-1/2 of what I was paying before.
I'm happy to have it as my little secret, but I hate to see y'all suffering.
Surely you realize this only works in low-population-density areas, with minimal economic disparity, and probably lots of self-sufficient property protection processes.
None of those factors are possible and/or desirable, in cities. And cities are necessary things.
What works where you are probably wouldn't work for most people. I'm trying to imagine any city with no police or fire protection, public roads, public utilities, etc.
If I (willingly) don't pay my taxes someone will put me in a tiny cage, violently ("tax evasion").
If I don't fix my road, I just can't go anywhere, which obviously forces me to voluntarily fix it. If I don't voluntarily fix it, I'm stuck until someone comes along with a backhoe, and given only the tiniest % of people will purposefully sabotage their ability to go buy groceries, the burden of having to fix a neighbors road is so miniscule that it fits well within tolerable natural rates of charity.
The end result is the county roads are enforced by violence (tax man will toss grandma out of her house if she doesn't pay up, and assault her if she resists), while the private roads are enforced by a mixture of voluntary action on your own property and some relatively rare charity for those who just don't give a shit if they ever leave their house.
The difference here is the government can initiate violence against me, while the people involved in the private roads cannot.
Your premise here is absurd. Let's suppose minimizing government is taken to the extreme and literally everything is privatized. Then there wouldn't even be a commons and everything would be privately owned. In no way shape or form does increasing the commons eliminate the tragedy of the commons.
Only the first of those has the potential for the kind of abuse you mention, I think, because it mimics the government kind of road in some ways where the maintenance costs aren't captured at the point of use. If it gets bad enough charging $0 you might need switch to some other kind of private road.
In any case this isn't nearly as bad as the tragedy of the commons situation if it is a government road, I think, at least as implemented. Our county roads have a tragedy of the commons situation where you could use the road and then some totally unrelated grandma gets dragged out of her house for not paying for it, despite the fact she's never even been on the road -- to me that seems strictly worse "tragedy of the commons" than even the public access private easement because at least under the private easement I can't initiated violence on unrelated persons for other people using the road.
It would seem quite hypocritical (and ironic) indeed to me for proponents of public roads to damn private roads under the idea of tragedy of the commons, so I'm not sure it's a valid indictment here that the tragedy of the commons is somehow becoming even more unsolved when roads are privatized.
That's not what I was asking. The definition - at least my def - is different, your cases don't explain how to solve it - indeed, there is no known solution, and that's the point. You can't get around government, which can solve some problems.
The only "known" solution is to privatize the commons. One way to do that in this example is to use a toll road.
It seems bizarre to damn some methods of private roads for not solving something you claim has no solution, then just glance over the ones that mitigate it.
You've shown no reason why you can't "get around government" but rather just dismiss the ways that just did.
California is what, the world’s sixth largest economy? But we (our political leadership broadly speaking) seem quite inept despite their abundant resources. Gotta to spend dollars on campaigning and gerrymandering instead, or you know losing 50 billion here and there to EDD fraud, or on high speed rail from Visalia to Modesto.
Federal taxes paid by California’s residents and businesses subsidize the budgets of the states who have made retaliatory gerrymandering efforts necessary. Spending money on Prop 50 is rational because California is on the verge of a durable situation of taxation without representation.
This same phenomenon shows why California will struggle to replace the federal government for funding basic research.
It never ceases to baffle my why Californians tend to opine towards a strong federal government when the documents authorizing it are structured such that California is virtually guaranteed to get the worst end of the deal. California has 12% of the population and 2% of the senators.
Every time Californians urge to give the federal government more power, even for "good" things, the rules of the game virtually demand it will be used against them. This might be a necessary evil for the bare minimums (military protection, federal court to settle contracts, enforcement of some federal laws), but I don't understand how Californians justify that every positive intention will be turned against them and carry on anyway.
Because they’re rich.
In the US, the rich always win anyway. Full stop.
If you believe otherwise, I’m sorry to say, but you’ve probably not been paying attention.
Under the current administration, as under all administrations, it’s the poor and middle class states that have the problem.
Well, now that taker states have figured out how to hack the system and bleed giver states while doing things such as neutering the EPA without facing electoral consequences, attitudes seem to be changing amongst people who previously were all right with subsidizing taker states on humanitarian grounds.
This is something baked into the constitution from the beginning.
The entire reason we have the senate is because the less populated slave states didn't want to get steam rolled by the the more populated northern free states. It was an anti-democracy measure to ensure low population regions get over-represented.
You have it backwards. It was mostly the smaller, Northern states like Delaware that were opposed to proportional representation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise
It's perverse that the compromise isn't named for the states who were denying suffrage to enslaved people but who wanted to claim them as population for the purposes of representation.
And that is part of the reason why the 10th amendment left many/most the functions the feds are currently performing to the states, and barred the feds from performing them.
i.e. California for a very long time, and even on rare occasion today, is constantly harassed by the DEA over intrastate commerce of marijuana despite the federal government having no power to do so. Californians were basically made to fund the extra-constitutional enforcement against them voted for by other states with per-capita outsized votes.
Since the US Civil War, it has been the feds forcing the ex-slave states into granting representation for their minority populations. States don’t have the power to force fair elections in other states without the feds — so the appreciation for the feds is understandable among those who believe in equal representation.
Sclerotic severe gerrymandering of every seat in the House of Representatives, enabled by the Roberts Court, though, is new.
The differences in population weren’t that massive in the early years, though.
The voting population difference was massive. The entire reason for the 3/5ths compromise was because the slave states would have almost no house representation.
Still not that massive in relative terms
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colonial_and_pre-Fed...
Virginia would had still been the most populous or at least second most populous state if only white people were counted.
Also there were plenty of small states in the Northeast with very small populations.
Adding up the 1780 numbers on that page, the numbers appear to be almost identical. But there's a catch: those numbers include enslaved people. who numbered at least 500,000 (see [1]).
* Free states: 1,390,067
* Slave states: 1,390,302 - 500,000 = 890,302
> Still not that massive in relative terms
I don't know why you persist in saying this.
[1] https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm
Persist in what? My original was that population sizes between states were relatively more even back then than now.
1780 is probably not the best year, though. e.g. New York was still a slave state. Of course the gap only grew bigger over time
With senators that's by design. But there are also issues with representatives, and I'm not sure how it came to be and if it can be solved.
The problem with representatives happened as a result of the Reapportionment Act of 1929 [1], which capped the house at 435 members.
tl;dr: the Republican party recognized that demographic shifts were going to make them a permanent minority in the House, so they refused to re-apportion the number of house members after the 1920 census, then in 1929 decided to cap the number of representatives permanently.
The simple fix is to repeal the law and apportion seats properly, likely by significantly growing the size of the House.
However, in typical Democrat fashion, they never bothered repealing the act and re-apportioning properly once they had power to do so.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
How robust would the reapportioned seats be against extreme political gerrymanders? It seems like packing and cracking would still work.
Not all of us! I favor secession.
The hsr hyperbole is pretty tired at this point. Turns out when you build a train between LA and SF serving a region in between that will have 15 million people in 40 years is pragmatic.
We could all band together and have another dedicated group collect money for it. It wouldn't be optional, either, because we mostly all agree it's valuable. Of course, there would have to be yet another group that sets how much money to collect, and how to spend it.
Oooh I love this idea. We could have some sort of process where everyone gets a say in deciding how the money is spent. Except maybe rather than everyone doing that you could have instead people whose job it is to do it, and everyone gets a say in deciding who those people are.
I wonder if this sort of thing has ever been tried.
It was tried once. Unfortunately it was ultimately killed off by a corrupt leader who took over the military and started deploying them the cities to stop crime. That leader ultimately strong armed the other elected officials into doing his bidding leading to the destruction of the once great nation. He ignored the law and the will of the people.
He was ultimately assassinated in 44BC. I believe his name was Julius Caesar.
To be fair Ceasar was replaced by a few even more oppressive wannabe tyrants. He never posted lists of his political enemies to be murdered and was generally pretty lenient.
Probably led to his downfall. Augustus made sure to squash all potential sources of opposition before taking over.
For sure. Julius ultimately just paved the way for the future tyrants. He consolidated the power into himself which made it a lot easier for his predecessors to take things further.
I understood what you meant, but the word you were looking for is "successors", not "predecessors". His predecessors were the senate, consuls, and the rest of the governing bodies of the republic.
> His predecessors were the senate, consuls, and the
Also Sulla and his opponents in the preceding civil war. Who paved the way for Cesar.
Another thing is that I’m not sure he really ignored the will of the people. “The people” were severely oppressed and the policies they supported ignored and rejected for the past 80+ years by the tightly knit oligarchy at the top. The overwhelming majority of its citizens probably had no real reasons to do anything to “protect” the republic.
Also it’s not like Caesar was the first to do what he did. He followed in the steps of a much more brutal and oppressive conservative/reactionary tyrant who almost had him executed a few decades ago.
I wonder what the Pinkerton’s schedule is like…
> have another dedicated group collect money for it
Sounds like S E C E S S I O N
lol...
> Who pays for it?
Mexico
I suspect we'll end up with a patchwork: From activist private organizations / charities. To state gov'ts in blue states. To just private industry (given how solar is now the least expensive energy source). To just private citizens who would prefer to work for less money on something valuable than squeeze a tiny bit more profit as a corporate cog.
Ideally the Federal gov't gets back into play, but we shouldn't plan for that future. It's a nice to have, but its a single point of failure. Especially if the Supreme Court doesn't believe in the independence of agencies anymore.
As an example, the American Academy of Pediatrics now has their own vaccine schedule, which they didn't have before. Nobody in their right mind trusts the CDC / FDA on this right now.
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> Imagine all the things we could get done if people donated only 1/3 of what our taxes currently are, and we just shit-canned the notion of taxes.
About a third as much, and this is assuming that people actually donate that much, which as a rule they don't, not even where people don't pay taxes.
Even if they paid private enterprises and didn't donate, they could recreate much of government functions, this time not under a monopoly with a captive buyer. I presume many people would want many of those services even if they chose to buy rather than donate them.
You tried that with healthcare. Turns out lots of people want to buy it, it just costs a large multiple of what everyone else in the world pay because actually a bunch of private sector middlemen doing the same adminstrative roles the government does isn't automatically more efficient.
We did not try eliminating government from healthcare. In fact many of the high cost of private payments arise from regulation or a tragedy of the commons situation introduced by government (i.e. ER required to take everyone but with no answer how to pay).
Even if we just let the pesky poors die, the US healthcare system would still be more expensive on a per use basis than the rest of the world.
Now sure, the absolute amount spent would probably be lower if we just assumed that people that couldn't produce paperwork to prove they could fund their ER visit didn't deserve to live. If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need lifesaving treatment they can't afford, that's a perfectly valid preference. It's just intellectually dishonest to frame an argument that it's inefficient to let poor people live as an argument everyone would get more care if it wasn't for the pesky government paying for it.
Wait which is it. We have a "private" system where we save "the pesky" poor and regulate licensing, insurance, provide medicare/medicaid, have a quasi-public system for ER where private payers fund those who won't pay, or we don't? You just switched entirely to some soap box about why we actually do have a bastardized private-public system and then damned me for pointing out the very false basis that you presumed because it was "intellectually dishonest" for me to point out your argument was intellectually dishonest.
Your premise was we have some kind of private system; my thesis is the uncovered poor would be better off with that than whatever it is we have now where they can maybe go to the ER "free" but otherwise pay a gazillion dollars in regulatory and other imposed costs if they actually try to get some prophylaxis.
If you want to say universal healthcare could be better than whatever we have now -- sure I won't disagree with that. Right now we have about the worst imaginable public-private bastardized system replete with deep regulatory capture.
>If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need lifesaving treatment they can't afford, that's a perfectly valid preference
... this is not my thesis at all, as you're relying on "can't afford" being at the level it is now where the poor are being billed for all manner of things they wouldn't be in an actually private free market and you're also relying an an absurd premise there will be no charity or any other options for them. For instance, in the Philippines I could just walk into a private pharmacy and buy penicillin essentially no questions asked to treat strep throat on the private market for ~half a day's local wages. (Yes Philippines have public healthcare and hospitals but you're not gonna get that meaningfully in some rural barangay). In USA it takes me 1-2 days wages to treat strep throat because I must go to a doctor to write me magic piece of paper that say I will not go in a cage for having a prescription drug, pay all his regulatory overhead, pay regulatory overhead for a lab, then go to a highly regulated pharmacist and then buy my antibiotics from probably the highest-barrier industry in the US through an anointed company and supply chain blessed by the government. I am much better off having cheap, but non-free antibiotics to treat strep than having to wait until it becomes Scarlet Fever and going to the ER for "free" or being taxed into oblivion to get "free" antibiotics that are then administered in the most bloated and uncompetitive way by government to the point I give up other necessities to pay the tax.
> Wait which is it. We have a "private" system where we save "the pesky" poor and regulate licensing, insurance, provide medicare/medicaid, have a quasi-public system for ER where private payers fund those who won't pay, or we don't?
You have the fully private provision you insist is more efficient. It costs more for worse outcomes than every other developed country, who also have regulations. If your original claim that the private sector is so efficient it could deliver everything for a third of the tax cost of the current system, it's remarkable that you're actually paying a large multiple the cost of the fully socialised systems for many people to have no care or crippling copays.
Sure, you can move the goalposts by claiming that true private provision requires there to be no medical regulations. But in order for that claim to be remotely credible you'd have to be able to point to all the countries that have great outcomes from having no medical regulations or public healthcare at all (the Philippines where the government is the main provider of healthcare but it doesn't have the time or inclination to enforce regulations on OTC antibiotics doesn't count, even if its health outcomes were excellent, which they're unsurprisingly not). Not gonna lie, if I'm suffering from the symptoms of a heart attack, I don't think antibiotics for half a day's pay are going to help, and literally the only efficiency argument for restrictions on ER rooms being allowed to employ extra admin staff to check insurance paperwork before deciding to administer treatment being an efficiency loss is that it's more efficient to let me die if I can't pay. As I've said, common argument but the complete opposite of your original setup where everyone gets the same outcomes for a third of the cost.
It's an extremely strong indication you've no experience with the US ER system that you think the efficiency issues are checking insurance at the door of a MI patient vs the fact they're required to at least entertain the hordes of people coming in with self reported "STD" or "doctor note for flu" when that kind of stuff shouldn't be appearing at the ER unless a lower acuity clinic has suspicion it might actually require emergent care. But of course why go to a clinic that is much cheaper when you can just show up at the ER and claim the pseudonym Pedro Sanchez with no ID and let the clinic bill it to all the other patients (which you insanely claim makes our system 'private' despite the fact all this happens at the behest of government), whom of course won't show up unless they're about dead because they not only will have to pay for these abuses but actually having something to lose. [Oh and how would I know this, only working ~1 yr in an inner city ER and seeing all the cases]
And you can argue that it would be better if those patients could get free urgent care instead of free ER to do the same thing at way higher cost, and I would agree that would be better than what we have now. But either way we're at an entirely different starting point.
What you can't argue is we actually have a private system in the US (and somehow miss the elephant in the room that over 1/3 of healthcare spending in the US is public Medicare/Medicaid, then add VA on top that) and then allude it's no true Scotsman or a moved goalpost if I point this out. In fact every time I do point it out, you just go back to morally proselytizing about dead poor people because it's a great way to distract from the fact you've lied and knowingly lied.
I mean, if we're in agreement that it'd be more efficient to have socialized healthcare than the non-socialized healthcare the US has, I'm not sure why you started off with the insistence that the private and charitable sector made everything so much more efficient it could provide all the actual benefits of the US government for a third of the cost.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't private hospitals entirely free not to accept EMTALA patients if they also choose not to accept Medicare funding? And that some do, and remarkably still manage to be significantly more expensive than the rest of the world. Weird all these profit making companies opting in to accepting the regulation though, if it's that big a burden.
Like I said, if it was easy to do so much better than socialized healthcare simply by abolishing regulations on the private sector (which itself is a different discussion entirely from whether private companies are intrinsically more efficient), it's surprising nobody seems to have achieved this, anywhere. The true purely private healthcare system that delivers the same or better health outcomes at lower cost doesn't exist.
I've never claimed I thought totally private healthcare might be 1/3 the cost of universal healthcare. I postulated the functions of our government as currently implemented might be able to achieve for 1/3 the cost if privatized. You invented some straw-man that argued I was arguing vs something else, something our government isn't even offering, so I'm unsure how you even got to the point you got to.
If you truly thought our health care was privatized it's all a moot point, because it wouldn't have been included in our original argument. In either case your point is moot because I never compared to hypothetical socialized healthcare but rather our current entire government system.
It blows my mind you would even use the "1/3" statement if you thought it was private because if it was private it wouldn't have even been in the subset of stuff I was comparing relative cost to. I never claimed private things would cost 1/3 the price of things already "private."
Paying for the inefficiencies of private healthcare is about half of US govt spend on providing services (the only larger spend is transfer payments, and you can't pay $4b in annuities to senior citizens from a private insurance scheme that takes in significantly less than that. So probably you need to cut healthcare by more than a third...). I actually believe the US could stay safe on a much lower military budget (though god knows what a private donor funded military would look like) but that's not getting the overall budget cut by a third even if you zero it out.
Mathematically impossible to achieve the functions of the US government for a third of the cost without cutting healthcare spend. Which has been demonstrated to be entirely possible by other countries, but only by choosing to let more people die or, ironically, removing some of the dependence on inefficient private companies for provision...
Obviously a lot of things can work more smoothly when people are willing to give away value for free.
Obviously people are a lot more willing to give away value when it costs them virtually nothing (like roads in a rural area with definitionally extremely low traffic)
Somehow when the county maintains them, the "virtually free" roads somehow become enormously expensive.
You can see the government having a monopoly and captive buyer causes them to be horribly inefficient, as they have no competition (and no private competitor will emerge when the price at point of use by their competitor is zero).
Yes it’s an imperfect system, but literally anyone anywhere can do what you’re describing. They don’t, hardly anywhere, because people don’t want to.
They don’t because the government is already confiscating their money to do (supposedly) exactly that.
Anyone can go buy a gigantic plot of land for dollars on the acre and do it. What are you talking about?
Here's a lovely 160 acre plot for $100,000: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/E1-4-Sec-15-T-24-R-89-Bk-...
Or do you mean people can't try this out in areas that have already been developed by generations' worth of other people's private and public investments?
In places where there are already public roads, private roads cannot generally compete because the price at point of use is $0 and the maintenance cost are sunk.
Imagine for a moment I had a private school that was equal in all ways to a nearby public school including cost. People would say "why I already paid taxes for the public school, why would I go there and then have to pay yet again." No one would go to the private school. Whereas if they were not made to pay the taxes, they'd be about as equally likely to go to the private school as the public one, and the overall costs would be same.
It is very difficult to establish a robust private road system in a place with public roads. The public views the public road as an established asset rather than the reality (they are an ongoing subscription of maintenance costs). The costs are invisible to the public, even if they might be worse, they just see the road as "free" when they drive on it. This means the public can end up spending even more money with worse results than use of private roads, but be stuck in a local minima they will never escape from.
Why are you ignoring what I just said?
You can go buy land anywhere you want (i.e. where there are no public roads) and your private roads can compete just fine.
Anyone has always been free to do this since this nation was created.
What's the problem?
Alright, lets imagine what you say.
I build a private interstate next to a public interstate.
Lets say it costs me $0.20 / mi per honda civic that travels on it, and the public road costs $0.30 / mi per honda civic that travels on it in amortized costs.
At the point of use, the user sees my toll of say, $.25 / mi with some profit, and at point of use the user sees $0.00 for the public highway.
Who on earth would bother to take my toll road, even though it is more efficient and cheaper? They've already paid the tax, and not only that, it is largely invisible to them. The government will literally imprison them or take their shit if they don't pay it, it is a sunk cost, the government has violently usurped my competition via payment under threat of violence.
You can't compete with 'free' at the point of use enforced by a violent actor against a sunk cost. Yes if you buy a plot of land that appears to not even be accessible by vehicle without some kind of unknown corner-crossing easement (one linked), then you will win out vs the non-existent competition there, but of course if the government shows up and taxes you to build a road even then you would lose.
Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.
It's not the public's job to provide customers for your toll road.
You can build your toll road and have unencumbered competition elsewhere.
>Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.
No I'm talking about using infrastructure a private entity has paid for as competition.
Would you call it "unencumbered" competition if I started stealing a few bucks from everybody that goes to the gas station, then paid people to take my road with the ill-gotten gains instead of the public interstate, then declared that the government is free to compete unencumbered? Of course you wouldn't, I can't just take money from everyone at the gas pump, but the government can so that their public "toll" is already paid and I can't compete even if my road is cheaper.
The end result is public roads have a mobster-type clamp on the encumbered market. You can't compete with them because they have a monopoly on violence and use it to prepay the toll to game the price at the point of use.
Huh?
What hypothetical car has the option to use your road or use the public road, but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road?
Agreed, when a public road provides your customer, it's hard to win that competition.
But again: you can just build your roads away from public roads, find your own customers, and then you don't need to compete with them.
>but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road?
Mine, where I live the roads for miles and miles are all private with public easements and are privately funded. Of course by your definition that would make the public road illegitimate, because it has unfairly poached a private road user (not sure I agree with that).
What's at the end of those miles and miles of privately funded roads?
Separately, how do you handle it when a neighbor decides to neglect their portion of a road?
Not sure what the illegitimacy point is about.
>What's at the end of those miles and miles of privately funded roads?
Sometimes other private roads, sometimes private property/houses, sometimes public roads. Sometimes people travel exclusively on private roads, sometimes not. I don't understand your point here, a private road isn't allowed to connect to a public road but a public road is allowed to connect to a private road? It doesn't pass any sort of symmetrical test.
>Separately, how do you handle it when a neighbor decides to neglect their portion of a road?
If they neglect their road they can't go buy groceries or use their property. So it is extremely rare, as they're basically forced to do it out of practicality, they would be hurting themselves more than anyone else. Down to the point it's well within the tolerable amount of charity. Usually some retired person comes along with a backhoe because they have nothing else to do, and until then the roads are large gridded so the roads never become impassable. In practice your concern hasn't become a problem in my years of living on private roads.
No, my point is that presumably the cars arrived on your self-sufficient private roads via public roads. Is this correct or not?
Re maintenance: Again, obviously doesn't work outside of an area that definitionally does not have very few people/businesses.
If everyone lived in density like yours, first of all we wouldn't have nearly anything good about modern life, but secondly yes we could obviously have the system you describe. I'll take public roads and modern life any day.
>No, my point is that presumably the cars arrived on your self-sufficient private roads via public roads. Is this correct or not?
Sometimes yes sometimes no.
>If everyone lived in density like yours, first of all we wouldn't have nearly anything good about modern life, but secondly yes we could obviously have the system you describe. I'll take public roads and modern life any day.
I'd say high density public roads are causing a big problems for cities. Cars are subsidized in a way that distorts the market to overrepresent car travel over private mass transit or other more efficient alternatives. I believe our cities would be much safer and more enjoyable, without losing access to needed goods, if the roads were all privatized.
Are you questioning the idea of having goverments to solve tragedy of commons problem?
I don't believe you can 'solve' the tragedy of the commons by increasing the size of the commons. Public government is a tragedy of the commons and shrinking it as close to, if not to the size zero, would reduce not increase the tragedy of the commons.
I'm not opposed to say, privatizing many functions of government so that they are no longer commons. I feel this would solve that problem better than making the commons larger.
Where (vaguely, of course) do you live? That sounds so different from my experience in a city.
Rural AZ
This is a bad idea.
Let's start off with the first point "They are just easements on private property" That's what most public roads are. They are still owned by the public (the government) and maintained by the public (the government). Where I'm from, we have plenty of dirt and gravel roads just like this. Once every 10 years or so the county comes in and re-gravels them. They are mostly only ever used by private individuals and they cross through private land, but they are ultimately public. There are actual dirt roads which are also publicly owned but unmaintained.
Where there are private roads, they've been an absolutely nightmare. What's happened with private roads is rich individuals tend to like to throw up gates and no trespassing signs on the roads. Particularly if it blocks off public land, which they don't own, and turns it into their playground. That happens all over the country. In particular you'll see it happen to lakes an on beaches all the time.
But finally, you benefit from the public road whether you want to admit it or not. And particularly when population density goes up, public roads become much MUCH more important. The model you propose is one that only works if we are in very rural locations. It completely breaks down as soon as you need to get goods into a grocery store or supermarket. We subsidize with our taxes the damage done to roads by shipping products and goods. Because I like eating fresh fruit and vegetables, I don't mind that I'm paying a little more taxes so I can have access to those goods. Along with amazon shipments and my mail.
There's a reason no ideal libertarian society exists, because they go to shit when they are tried (see Argentina who is currently looking for a bailout from the US because of their dumb economic policies that you likely support). There are plenty of failed "free town" experiments. The book "A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear" is an amusing story about exactly how this system ultimately turns into a trash heap city.
Honestly I will just thank my lucky stars most people believe this fiction you present, because it's keeping the more libertarian areas cheap and without too many busybodies. It seems you've not heard of public access private easements or private trash service, and you haven't learned how to shoot a bear.
I pay like $50/month in property taxes and that's basically exclusively for public school and college, which while I'm not thrilled to be paying anything above $0 at least basic education has a massively positive ROI.
We don't have any sort of effective police/fire presence, public roads, any public utilities, or really any government services besides grade school education and it's been that way for 50+ years without any sort of apocalypse or us all being eaten by bears. Which is amazing because I don't have to worry about some asshole coming along to choke me out on the pavement were it I would have the bad judgement to sell a loose untaxed cigarette.
So far the place hasn't turned into a trash heap, and I've gotten the services I used to get by public services in other areas for 1/3-1/2 of what I was paying before.
I'm happy to have it as my little secret, but I hate to see y'all suffering.
Surely you realize this only works in low-population-density areas, with minimal economic disparity, and probably lots of self-sufficient property protection processes.
None of those factors are possible and/or desirable, in cities. And cities are necessary things.
What works where you are probably wouldn't work for most people. I'm trying to imagine any city with no police or fire protection, public roads, public utilities, etc.
I would really like to see private medical system problem solved in USA.
Government is just organized volunteering. You’re describing a government. You created your own mini government for your road maintenance.
If I (willingly) don't pay my taxes someone will put me in a tiny cage, violently ("tax evasion").
If I don't fix my road, I just can't go anywhere, which obviously forces me to voluntarily fix it. If I don't voluntarily fix it, I'm stuck until someone comes along with a backhoe, and given only the tiniest % of people will purposefully sabotage their ability to go buy groceries, the burden of having to fix a neighbors road is so miniscule that it fits well within tolerable natural rates of charity.
The end result is the county roads are enforced by violence (tax man will toss grandma out of her house if she doesn't pay up, and assault her if she resists), while the private roads are enforced by a mixture of voluntary action on your own property and some relatively rare charity for those who just don't give a shit if they ever leave their house.
The difference here is the government can initiate violence against me, while the people involved in the private roads cannot.
So how the tragedy of commons problem is solved?
Your premise here is absurd. Let's suppose minimizing government is taken to the extreme and literally everything is privatized. Then there wouldn't even be a commons and everything would be privately owned. In no way shape or form does increasing the commons eliminate the tragedy of the commons.
I don't think your definition of commons is the same as mine.
How would you maintain the road if I, who also uses the road, doesn't pay for maintenance?
There are a few kinds of private roads
-public access private easements (my road)
-public access non easement (grocery store parking lot, cost amortized by customers)
-toll road (some highways, etc)
-completely private road (only owner uses it, i.e. private farm road)
Only the first of those has the potential for the kind of abuse you mention, I think, because it mimics the government kind of road in some ways where the maintenance costs aren't captured at the point of use. If it gets bad enough charging $0 you might need switch to some other kind of private road.
In any case this isn't nearly as bad as the tragedy of the commons situation if it is a government road, I think, at least as implemented. Our county roads have a tragedy of the commons situation where you could use the road and then some totally unrelated grandma gets dragged out of her house for not paying for it, despite the fact she's never even been on the road -- to me that seems strictly worse "tragedy of the commons" than even the public access private easement because at least under the private easement I can't initiated violence on unrelated persons for other people using the road.
It would seem quite hypocritical (and ironic) indeed to me for proponents of public roads to damn private roads under the idea of tragedy of the commons, so I'm not sure it's a valid indictment here that the tragedy of the commons is somehow becoming even more unsolved when roads are privatized.
That's not what I was asking. The definition - at least my def - is different, your cases don't explain how to solve it - indeed, there is no known solution, and that's the point. You can't get around government, which can solve some problems.
The only "known" solution is to privatize the commons. One way to do that in this example is to use a toll road.
It seems bizarre to damn some methods of private roads for not solving something you claim has no solution, then just glance over the ones that mitigate it.
You've shown no reason why you can't "get around government" but rather just dismiss the ways that just did.