It’s been awhile since I have seen something refer to the internet as the “information superhighway”. But as I was in the shower, I had this thought. What if our roads worked like the internet.
So here’s my story.
You get new great paying job. But it is in this new flourishing country called Internetia. You don’t know much about it but you can’t beat the money and the great job. So you decide to take the job and move there.
The company is very nice and set you up with a house in the town that the business is in. But there is one problem when you arrive. The house has 3 separate roads to the house and at the house there is a gate in front of each of the 3 driveways to the house. One road is just a two track dirt road (dial up/DSL). The second road is gravel (Satellite) and the third road is paved (Cable).
Calling the company, you find out that the government does not own the roads, private companies do. To be able to get around, you have to choose which company that you want to pay a monthly fee to for access to the road and maintenance of said road.
The dirt road, because its so old and not maintained at all, is the cheapest. Also, you have a few companies that you can choose from who offer different services. Things like they will plow your driveway and the road in the winter or they will offer you off road tires for your car for a premium. Even though they are the cheapest, it would take you almost an hour to get to work as they don’t really connect to the highway. When they do, its really far away and very congested as many of the other people (the majority of the people in the town) can’t afford to use the other roads. When the weather gets bad, sometimes you can’t even make it through the road to work. So you end up stuck at home. But since it is already bad, the weather doesn’t affect is as much as the others since it’s already pretty hard to traverse. If you pay for the extra services (aka DSL). You get the off road tires, they will grate the route between you and the highway and make sure the road is plowed. This extra services to the dirt road can actually cut your time down to 30 minutes to get to work.
Now the gravel road looks kind of promising. It would only take you 10 to 20 minutes to get to work. The problem is, that it is very susceptible to the elements. The gravel is very loose and washes out all the time. Causing to you have to take different routes or not travel the road altogether. Although the timing to get to work is pretty good, you run the risk constantly of not being able to get to work every time the wind picks up or the storms roll in.
The paved road is awesome. But man is it expensive. They charge a lot. Almost 3 times more than the dirt road. Plus you always run the risk of them changing the rates. But it’s fast. Using the paved road you can get to work between 5 and 15 minutes. It is very resilient to the weather but it still suffers from potholes and they take their sweet ass time getting around to fixing them. Add to this, they only allow certain cars on their roads so that it adversely affect the pavement. But you have to get to work and this does combine the speed of the gravel road and the reliability of the dirt road.
So, like most people in Internetia, you start out with the dirt road just to see how bad it is. After the first month, you are late all the time and it is literally beating the crap out of your car. Plus, you had two days this month that you couldn’t make it to work because of the traffic jam at the end of the dirt road.
So you decide to go with the gravel road. There are only 2 companies that currently offer service for the gravel road gate. And each only owns particular parts of the road and maintain only those parts. You are getting to work on time, but you missed 5 days of work because 3 of the days the gravel was washed out because of the rain and 2 days because some jackass spun out on the gravel and they had to take the road down to fix the gravel grating and you couldn’t re-route because you only had access to certain roads leading to the highway.
So even though it is pushing your budget to the limit, you sircumb th the paved road. There is only 1 company that handles the paved roads. You’re not late for work and you have made it every day. Things are great and you can get everywhere. Sometimes there is delays due to the weather waiting for snow plows or construction. But generally you can be prepared for those situations.
What you weren’t prepared for was the fact that after having the paved road “subscription” for six months, they doubled your rate. Calling them, they said that was in the small print in the contract that you agreed to. Not to mention, you are tied into that contract for a full year. You were already pushing your budget with that in the first place. But you are pretty savvy so you are able to negotiate with the operator to split the difference over the next six months. But after the year is up, you have to pay full price (fingers crossed for a raise).
While you are dealing with this, a buddy of yours at works tells you that you can get helicopter service to and from your home (fiber). But you would have to win the lotto to afford it and they would have to come in and build a helipad in your backyard. Not even an option for you, but you know it is there.
Also talking with your buddy, you find out things could have been worse. Since your house already had the roads and driveways already done, you only had to pay for the service. He bought a house out in the country and he would have had to pay for them to build the gravel or paved road to his house. They wouldn’t even split the difference even though it would have provided paved service to all the people around the area that he was at. So he’s been forced to get by with dirt road service still some other sucker pays for the road to be put in.
So, coming from the United States, you think this whole thing is very bizarre. In fact, many of your co-workers from the states and local think this is kind of fucked up.
While in a local bar, you talk to one of the locals that was born and raised there. You ask him “Why was this set up this way? In the US, the government owns the roads.”. He responds “We don’t trust the government to do a good enough job and we believe in the free market and pure capitalism.” After thinking about it for a bit, you respond back to the local. “I can see how this looks like it is a free market environment because we have options. But in actuality, what is going on is that there is a free market for the crappy dirt road, an Oligopoly for the less crappy gravel road and a monopoly on the paved road. We as a community are paying 3 times as much for transportation services than the US and we have less access. There is a very limited amount of road but a ridiculous and almost disgusting amount of roads going to the same places. If the government owned and was in charge of the roads and we just paid taxes on the roads, we would have more roads at less cost. The companies then could focus on providing better driveways, road services, plowing at a significantly lower cost to them and to the consumer.”
“Bah! That would never work!” said the local. “First off, the Paved road company would never let go of their ownership of the paved road. The gravel road guys would be reluctant and nothing would happen with the roads except they would fall into disarray since the government is in charge of the road and they are completely inept. Not to mention the government couldn’t afford to by the roads and we don’t want to have to pay that much in taxes for the purchase of the roads.”
Unfortunately, the local had a good point.
“What if the government just took control of the roads without paying for them. They give tax break to the companies to offset the loss of the road assets and the companies continue to be able to charge for the road maintenance and services?”
He started laughing “There is no way any of the parties would be able to afford that. The government would lose a significant amount of revenue with giving the tax breaks to the companies. The people would be outraged because they would be charged the difference when these companies are getting these huge tax breaks and we will still be paying the ridiculous cost charged by the road companies to maintain all these roads and also to upgrade or remove the other roads to bring them all up to the same standard.”
After thinking about it, I said “so I guess there isn’t anything we can do then, huh?”
He shrugged “guess if you don’t like it, you can always do like all the other companies in the country and move operations to countries that are actually buying the roads and investing in their infrastructure.” He then laughed and went back to his drink.
6 months later, the company you worked for closed its operation and moved it to Socialismia. Since the infrastructure costs were dramatically lower for them and their employees. Enough to afford to relocate all their employees willing to move there. With less and less people in Internetia, all the roads started falling apart. It became a ghost town of countries until it fell into civil war and eventually was overtaken by another country.
Good thing the government owns the roads in this country! LOL
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I guess the moral of my story if I was to have one is that we have to be careful as to what we consider *capitalism*. Some can make a very valid argument as to why something is a free market without really looking at something. But more to the point is that government, for good or bad, has a purpose.
To me, capitalism, by itself is a parasite. There good parasites and bad parasites. Without a predator to keep the parasites in check, it can and will eat itself into oblivion. A balance of Capitalism and Socialism is what breeds a true Free Market environment and society. It is a symbiosis that makes it work. Too much of one or the other will starve itself to death. I could go into it more, but I’ll save that story for later.