>>privatization is a good thing. the free market does everything better than the government; everything.
Roads are a legitimate use of government. Government roads serve everyone equally. It was Roman roads that permitted the easy spread of Christianity throughout the known world in the 1st century AD. The National System of Interstate and Defense Highways is not something for private contractors and investors to squeeze revenue from and then do minimal improvements.
In a certain city, private companies ran most of the water and wastewater plants for many years. They ran them into the ground, sucking all the money out of them and putting almost nothing back into them. Finally, the city had to take them back because public health and the environment was being threatened. It has taken 20 years to repair the damage.
Private enterprise beats government at almost everything. Management of critical infrastructure is not one of them.
privatize interstates not all roads. just the interstates.
in the bad old days, private enterprise had neither the scope nor scale to finance, build, and maintain entities as big as interstates. Today, private enterprise has the capability in spades.
socialism for interstates has failed. Time to let the free market do its magic
“Private enterprise beats government at almost everything. Management of critical infrastructure is not one of them.”
You’re just a Socialist. LOL. Be ready for the tolling shills (you know, the ones that think you can have 10 companies each running parallel toll roads between city pairs, so that you can have ‘competition’ on a level playing field). If you don’t support handing MONOPOLY CONTROL of our highways to foreign interests, you are a SOCIALIST - at least by their ‘reasoning’.
Bottom line: 90% (or more) of the value of a highway is the right-of-way, it is NOT the concrete - that part is very cheap (usually less than 2 cents per mile, in most areas). The reason tolls average 20 cents to $1.00 per mile for ‘private’ highways is that they control the right-of-way...and can charge market rates for it (along with charging for the tolling systems, bond holders, sending money to Australia, government/executive revolving door types, cronies, and lobbyists).
We might as well hand over all our airways to United (I don’t know, maybe for $100 Billion) - let them charge what they want for 50 years, and then call it ‘free market’ and ‘capitalism’, because it would meet the definition promoted by several people here.