Its helpful to look hard at individual areas and ask, honestly, "Will the market work here?" The benefits of the market are too numerous to go into, but obviously if a field can be served by a functioning market, that's the best solution.
However, there are conditions that must be met for a market to function properly
- Bonding contracts
- Equality of information
- Property rights
- Competition
... etcetera. Lots of elements need to be in place for a market to work.
Americans, as a whole, agree that some things are not appropriate for a market. Policing our communities is not farmed out to the lowest bidder. Fire protection is not shopped between competing firms. Road building, by and large, is not financed by universal toll roads.
There are good reasons for all of these. Take roads, for instance. If I control the road between Huntsville and Janesburg, I have a
de facto monopoly, and the only way to create market conditions would be to build alternate roads between the two towns, or to build a tramway, or a dirigible service. This would be insanely wasteful, as well as resulting in, at best, a duopoly rather than a monopoly.
Bookmarks