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but profit, would you seek to magnify your expenses by hiring costly road maintenance crews every year? Or would you use the modern technology at your disposal and incur only marginally higher initial costs to build a road that can serve you over twenty lifetimes without requiring repair? Moreover, if you, as a private entrepreneur, were to charge tolls for each vehicle that used your road, it would be in your interest to attract as many vehicles as possible. Every day and every stretch of space which construction occupies during the road's lifetime inherently cuts your profits by the amount that the cars passing through that space during that time would have generated in tolls! If you were at all intellectually endowed (and to become a road entrepreneur you would need to be), you would realize that authorizing major repairs on a private road, after it had already been opened, is financially ruinous!

Thus, it is evident that, if roads were privatized, and the unlimited private construction of new roads were authorized, major road maintenance would cease to exist altogether; there would be no need for it! As for those minor tasks of road cleaning, such as removing pebbles and roadkill, incentives will develop for private companies to invent means of doing so without interrupting the traffic flow, since such innovations will maximize the profit that these companies receive from an increased and steady volume of traffic.

The question still remains as to why the Roman roads have a life expectancy two thousand times greater than that of American roads. Were these roads privately built? Such a contention is not as far from the truth as may seem at first glance. Unlike modern armies, Rome's was not exclusively controlled by bureaucrats or raised on public funds. Often, generals themselves would devote vast private fortunes to the gathering, equipping, and rewarding of troops, who would swear loyalty oaths to their commander, not to the Roman state. Commanders such as Marcus Crassus and Julius Caesar, both possessors of immense personal wealth, did precisely that. They needed to concern themselves with the logistical aspects of war as well, for these were what distinguished Roman armies from the barbarians they had to fight. Roman troops would often personally labor on the roads they would later use as avenues between their outposts on the empire's borders and channels of communication with the capital. Many a Roman general's pockets may have been deep, but they were not infinitely deep. And to prevent their depletion, the generals had every incentive to render the roads they commissioned as deep as possible! One may, using Rome's history as an example, question the wisdom of privatizing the military, but the private roads that such a private military built were the most impeccable ever seen in history. Were I given a choice of the route to travel on, I would favor a Roman road over any one of the modern American monstrosities, hands down.

It is time that we renounce hours of painstaking frustration and needless confusion, which we owe to rampant statism and cronyism. We need to cease being governed by barbarians outside the borders of Reason, and rediscover elementary insights that have been waiting to be put to use for over two thousand years.

Learn more about this author, G. Stolyarov II.
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