Once stubbornly self-reliant, Americans now expect the government to provide them with much more than the basics of national defense, a stable currency, police and fire protection and public education. Now the alphabet soup of government agencies is supposed to meet our insatiable demands for housing, child care, health care, retirement income, etc. Medicare even pays for Viagra, illustrating French economist Frederick Bastiat’s still relevant observation that: “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
This “safety net” gobbles up so much money, there’s not enough left over to pay for what traditionally has been a primary state function ever since the ancient Romans erected 53,000 miles of hand-hewn stone roads to facilitate their military conquests.
Traffic on the United State’s 50-year-old interstate highway system increased 38 percent between 1991 and 2001, yet only 5 percent of additional mileage was added during the same decade. Road-building at the state and local level has also lagged far behind traffic, as Washington-area motorists are so acutely aware.
Many academics now believe that any major highway improvements in the future will be in the form of privately funded toll roads, Independent Institute research fellow Gabriel Roth told The Examiner. A former transportation economist for the World Bank, Roth is also editor of “Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and The Future of Roads” in which a number of other experts make the case for reprivatizing the nation’s roads. Roth himself persuasively argues that the much higher costs associated with political control and congestion in urban areas make privatization the best option — despite the political class’ great reluctance “to give up a lucrative source of power and influence.”
George Mason economist Daniel Klein noted in one chapter that the original 13 states admitted “they were unequal to the task” of road-building and asked private investors to step in. A 62-mile road between Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pa., opened in 1794 as the nation’s first private turnpike. For the next 100 years, private companies built up to 52,000 miles of toll roads — equivalent to the Roman’s crowning public works achievement. By the 20th century, however, road building had become almost exclusively a government function.
That’s beginning to change. The $7.2 billion Trans-Texas Corridor from Dallas to San Antonio is the largest private road investment to date, and private consortiums in places such as Chicago have taken over responsibility for maintaining existing highways in exchange for the tolls they generate. In Virginia, the privately owned Dulles Greenway will soon be joined by a public/private initiative that will add high-occupancy toll lanes to the Capitol Beltway.
The Romans managed to maintain their road network for seven centuries until externalpressures and economic decline from within eventually forced them to abandon the effort. By 476 A.D., many Roman vias (roads) had fallen into ruin. One of the signs of Rome’s fall was its unwillingness to continue the great transportation network that had helped create such a vast and powerful empire in the first place.
