You have never spent hours baking in 35C weather waiting in traffic backed up at a tollbooth on the Italian Autostrada. Sometimes traffic is backed up for kilometers and kilometers.

The people that own them don't really care that much, because they get their money just the same, and since they have a monopoly, they don't have any real competition unless you take the train or a plane, which simply isn't possible in many cases.

Transaction costs. Toll collectors get paid shitloads of money. You also pay a cost in lost time. If you get paid $50/hour and spend 5 minutes a day stuck at a toll plaza, you're wasting over $4 in time daily, which is often 4 times the monetary cost of the toll. Over a work-year, you'd spend nearly $1400 in lost time while waiting for tolls.

Maybe competition between roads would reduce the time spent at tolls. Also, presumably, unmanned toll booths would be used.

You may currently be spending more than $1400 to the government to pay for government roads. With competitive incentives in road placement and size, you might save more than enough time to offset the transaction costs.

Until the development of electronic transponders, there was a physical limit to how quickly you can collect tolls. It may be somewhat practical now that you have drive-through tollbooths, but there are a bunch of other problems it creates. For example:

Roads are a high-fixed-cost-low-variable-cost industry. I posted on these at Reddit - http://reddit.com/info/2fquz/comments/c2fttk. Everything that's wrong with airlines will go wrong with roads, and more. I suspect that you'll see massive overinvestment in roads as road companies try to capture market share, then the huge number of intersections (all toll, remember?) will reduce driving efficiency.

Free markets solve a lot of things, but they don't solve everything. There's no magic wand that makes them more efficient than a public solution. There are, however, a series of incentives and information-transmission mechanisms that usually give a free-market operator an information advantage over a public operator, hence letting them produce more efficiently. If the incentives point in the wrong direction, though, you get less efficient production.

You seem to be asserting that consumers are not better off with the airlines deregulated. Although I hate air travel and everyone likes to complain about it, I don't think you can argue that, as government has been removed from airline regulation, air travel has become vastly more cheaper and available to more people and that it is possible to reach many more locations by plane.

Similarly for another high fixed cost industry which you cite - telecommunications.

Free markets might not solve everything, but they're almost always better than the alternatives. As examples of the alternatives, consider the postal service, government-run schools, Medicare and welfare.

The governments subsidize airports through enormous amounts of land close to cities at below market rates. Without this intervention, airfare would be much more expensive. Do you think we would be better off if airports would have had to purchase their land on a true free market or is it good for a government to give airports cheap land?

It's hard to know. Presumably the system would look different today if the government had not distorted it in that way. Perhaps if market incentives were allowed to operate instead of the land being taken, we would all be flying around in the jet cars we expected.

I doubt it. Fossil fuel based flying cars are even more unsustainable than our current cars...

You sound so sure. You don't think if the enormous amounts of subsidies the government had spent on airports had instead been allowed to flow to alternative transportation modes or energy research, things might be different?

OK, it is certainly true that things would be different in a better way if our government would spend a sizable portion of the taxbase on energy research instead of wasting it an utterly insane manner.

There don't have to be toll booths. If you think that's a bad idea, why assume it would have to be used?

Another option is a monthly subscription fee for unlimited access to all roads a company owns. If there are a small number of large companies this might be convenient. And don't complain about fear of monopoly -- the alternative is a total government monopoly.

There are various possible ways the road use for subscribers only might be enforced. Offhand, none sound especially convenient. But they all sound better than the status quo: all people in the area are counted as "subscribers", even if they don't own a car, and are all billed, and this is backed up with guns. That's worse than any of the non-ideal enforcement mechanisms I can imagine. And while it may save a bit on transaction costs, it does that by not even trying to differentiate a subscriber from a non-subscriber.

How do you collect the money if there are no toll booths? Subsidize the private corporation by having police stop people without them?

You don't seem to be considering a couple of things:

The "backed up by guns" (if you want to have a serious discussion, these sorts of libertarian cliches could perhaps be checked at the door) tax funded roads have benefits that extend beyond the road users. "Externalities" as it were, in terms of lower prices for goods that are easily and quickly shipped to the area, competition for other modes of transportation, and perhaps jobs in sectors like tourism.

If, ignoring the externalities, you wish to more directly attach the costs to the people utilizing the roads, you could raise gas taxes. Of course, that has its own positive and negative aspects, and winners and losers.

The real world is tremendously complicated, and I don't think it's really possible to predict everything. However, I don't think that means that you can simply ignore some of the more interesting facets of economics and say "errr, just let the market take care of it" - it's just too simplistic.

I think a 99% literacy rate shows the success of our schools at providing a certain base level of education. If our poor population had to choose between food, energy, and school the literacy rate would plummet.

And you don't want people to be able to make their own choices about what to spend their time and money on, or what?

No, children should not have to or be able to make a choice about basic education. As nostrademons was saying, democracy begins to fall apart with a completely uneducated populace.

Not children, or their parents, I take it. So, how exactly do you draw the line of which ideas should be forced on unwilling families in the name of basic education?

You're asking me to describe a curriculum. The curriculum nostrademons proposed sounds great to me. As a start, it's good to force reading and math on unwilling families in the name of basic education.

That's great if everyone agrees to put nostrademons in charge. Instead what you get is:

"When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."

-- The late Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, 1985

OK... You asked a question, I answered, and you tell me my response is invalid because I don't have any power. This should make your responses similarly invalid. One of the assumptions in this thread was that we did have the power to make changes, otherwise all we could talk about was whether to vote Republican or Democrat.

I didn't ask that question. But the point is your solution requires putting/keeping the government in charge of education, just like we have now. Once the power is given, all kinds of interests become involved and people like Albert Shanker participate in how kids are educated.

I'd prefer to let parents decide how best to educate their children. The entire system shouldn't be designed to accommodate the outlying parents you fear who don't care about their kids.

My intended question was by what method the required curriculum should be decided. But I think that's clear now: what you consider "basic". What you are proposing is to set up a ruling system that permanently entrenches certain ideas (such as math lessons). No disagreement is allowed: the unwilling should be forced, not tolerated.

I think this is a step backwards. In the USA we have moved away from Who Should Rule? and Which Ideas Should Rule? and the focus is more on how should disputes be decided. Force is not a rational answer to that, and we have embodied this in our tolerance for queer and strange people/ideas, even disagreeable ones. The main feature of our system of Government is also about how disputes should be decided: it is responsive to changes in opinion of our citizens (via voting): when many people change their minds about an issue the government is changed correspondingly -- even about basic education. So disputes can be decided by persuasion instead of force.

It's worth noting that basic math or reading education are not presently required in some States, so requiring them would reduce freedom of choice relative to real life today. For example, in Kansas, there are essentially no requirements for home schoolers, including no record keeping, testing, or required subjects. http://www.hslda.org/laws/default.asp?State=KS

Reading is a very important skill we have for functioning in society, though screenreaders make it easier to be illiterate than ever.

Math is a fundamental truth of the universe. I don't think any argument exists against the required teaching of these two subjects, other than stating libertarianism is always better.

If I was the dictator of the USA (or Equatorial Guinea), I wouldn't actually write the curriculum myself and force it on everyone. I'd get a board of experts and outsiders with qualified opinions to write it. Then the people would pass it by referendum, to give them that nice illusion of choice.

"I don't think any argument exists against the required teaching of these two subjects, other than stating libertarianism is always better." - rms

Two competing schools of thought about how to treat the best ideas we have today -- the ones we feel most certain of, and have the hardest time imagining a reasonable person could dispute -- we might call the School of Certainty and the School of Fallibility. The first believes our best ideas are the ultimate truth and wishes to set up societal institutions which best embody those truths. The second believes that it is important to remember we might be wrong and our vision is limited, so we should set up institutions with a focus on error correction, which means openness to new ideas and approaches, tolerance of differences, and not using force in the name of sanctioned ideas. The first school is more concerned with creating a good society by present day standards. The second is more concerned with creating a free society where people live by their own standards.

The School of Fallibility is often ridiculed. Certainly we aren't all wrong about common sense opinion X, it's so obvious. Why do we have to be so careful and cautious about even the most basic things? That's a lot of wasted effort, and it allows people to make huge, unnecessary mistakes and ruin their lives.

We live in a period of rapid change. Many mainstream, traditional, long held, obvious, common sense opinions have been thrown out in the last century. This story is well known for science, and civil rights and many other issues. But still people are complacent. We changed. We got better. What remains obvious today must be even more certain.

So, rms, perhaps I can surprise you away from complacent certainty by presenting an argument which you did not think existed.

I know a lot of people who don't like math, and who actively avoid using it in their lives. One can have a successful life today even in the extreme case of irrationally avoiding all math. Consider the adults today who dislike and avoid math: forcing childhood math lessons on them did not turn out to have helped. Now they have a grudge against the subject fueled by deeply unpleasant memories. It's harder for them to actually learn math now, should they find a use for it. Therefore it would be better not to require math lessons, and instead to let people learn it themselves on their own initiative if/when they find a reason to want to. We might call this approach Just In Time Learning.

Most adults are mentally well adjusted enough that the mental scars of early torture by long-division fade into the background. Even adults that dislike math need to use it in their day to day lives. I don't think the math that many people truly dislike because of its perceived uselessness, like geometry and algebra, need to be mandatory, but someone with a McJob needs to make change and calculate their monthly wage from their hourly wage.

I would be curious to hear your examples of someone leading a successful life while irrationally avoiding all math.

People with a McJob don't need to calculate change: that's the cash register software's job. And many people avoid calculating their wage or budget -- their spouse does that kind of thing.

Perhaps you will reply they at least need to be able to count to 4 to hand back the right number of each coin. And need to be able to read numbers to answer questions like, "What does the Super Mushroom Burger cost?"

But the blatant usefulness of a skill is no argument in favor of required education of it -- won't people want to learn it voluntarily? And those who disagree, why can't you leave them alone?