Privately-repaired potholes: a good start - Mises Economics Blog

The article starts off saying KFC offered to fix some of the roads in Chicago if they could paint an advertisement on them, BUT WERE TURNED DOWN! Huh?

Privately-repaired potholes: a good start - Mises Economics Blog:

"..why are potholes and road maintenance even an issue? Governments have been telling us for centuries that they must own the roads, that no one else can do it, and that road-building and maintenance is one of the reasons we must have government.

Yet, governments are terrible at this. Daily now, we are inundated with reports of how bridges are falling down, roads are in disrepair, and the infrastructure in general is a nightmare. And this caught government by surprise? The life span of roads and bridges isn't a big mystery. If roads are the government's specialty, why are they so lousy at it, and why did they not even notice that their bridges are in lousy shape? It's not as if this problem couldn't be anticipated.

So now, everywhere across America, at local, state and federal levels, Americans are being told that taxes must be increased to pay for road and bridge repair. But why? There are already taxes in place for this. The tax revenues for this are generally based on vehicle registration fee revenues, gas taxes, and income taxes. All of these taxes increase either with the number of cars on the road, or with miles driven, or with population growth, or with economic growth. In other words, tax revenues have increased many times over, yet we're now being told 'oops we forgot about the roads, so give us more money."

Mises has a really good article!