markvee said:
What is it about police services, fire departments, and roads that make them better provided by government forced monopoly?
how would you envision them being provided otherwise? and perhaps throw in the army and prisons while you are at it?
You didn't answer my question, but I will try to answer yours. As I've stated previously, services are provided more efficiently in a competitive free market than under a monopoly of central planning. However, I am not a competitive free market; I am an individual, so I can at best speculate how the free market would answer a question, and my individual speculation may not amount to a better answer than another individual's central planning. With that caveat, I will attempt to speculate.
Fire departments are the easiest because individuals have organized themselves into voluntary fire departments without government intervention. In terms of a paid fire department, I don't see why there couldn't be competitive fire departments just as there are competing taxi companies that can be called.
As for the army, the Germans avoided invading Switzerland during World War II because Switzerland has a well-armed citizenry. Well-armed insurgents have repelled technically superior invaders as the Vietnamese repelled Americans and the Afghans repelled Soviets. As a US-led invasion looked imminent, Saddam Hussein distributed guns among the Iraqis. I think an army is more important for offensive activities of the state rather than defensive activities of the people.
Why can't individuals openly carry a gun for their self defence, as police do? I think the reason is that the primary function of the police is to protect and serve the state rather than the people, and unequal rights to self defence facilitate their job as law enforcement officers for the state. I think that there are still some police who favour being peace officers rather than law enforcers, but I think that this is an individual choice rather than one promoted by the state. Also, police have replaced highwaymen, acting as mobile tax collectors in their police cruisers with their ticket quotas. If you call for police while under attack then you will have to wait for them to arrive, and they will not engage the aggressor until it is safe for them to do so, regardless of the consequences to you. I think that you are best served arming yourself or employing a security agency whose contract with you is unclouded by a law enforcement mandate.
Private prisons already exist, so it is not difficult to imagine how they might be run, but the real question is how justice would be administered under free market system. There would be no universal laws against things such as drug use or bawdy houses, but there still would be property rights and voluntary contracts, so there would need to be a mechanism to settle cases of assault, murder, theft, property damage, and contract violations. The best that I can offer is that people would obtain their arbitrators on the free market as they do everything else, and people who do not abide by arbitration would develop poor justice histories akin to poor credit histories that would impede future ability to violate others’ property.
As for roads, individuals would maintain roads on their own property, as already happens in parts of cottage country, but highways are more complicated. I can see them being taken over by toll companies that would charge a usage fee to cover maintenance. It would be difficult to build competing highways because the land would need to be purchased from voluntary sellers. The government can more readily build highways by expropriating the land, but is the ease of obtaining the land for highways worth the cost of loss of property rights? Under government, people do not really own their land. They pay rent (property taxes) to government and can lose their stewardship of land to government at any time through expropriation. The government can even expropriate land from one individual and then turn around and sell the land to another individual, as was done with the commercial properties around Dundas Square in Toronto.
