>Basically people don't move house willy-nilly, but when they move house they can take considerations like roads and railroads etc into account. Locations aren

>Basically people don't move house willy-nilly, but when they move house they can take considerations like roads and railroads etc into account. Locations aren't fungible and the kinds of long term population movements your taking about take decades. People, including those running the companies that manage the roads are terrible at working on those kinds of time scales. I can guarantee you, that you would end up with companies extracting the maximum possible rent today without worrying about the effect on the long term population effects of the area. The CEO of roadco isn't going to care that raising the road tolls will depopulate a community in 30 years. I don't want to live in a world where the health of a community depends on the long term thinking of an unelected private corporation, where the only recourse I have is to uproot my family and move somewhere else. >What often works better is deliberately decreasing barriers to entry. That's the problem with roads. The barriers to entry are far too high to allow new competitors to easily enter a market, and the only way to make them low enough to foster serious competition requires allowing private companies to seize even more private property. >Long term contracts assure that your decision will be valid for as long as you like to negotiate. There's no reason for a company with a monopoly on the shortest route between 2 desirable places to enter into a long term contract. Call up Comcast and tell them you want to pay $60 a month for the next 10 years. They'd laugh at you because they have no reason to negotiate with individuals. Even if it was possible, you'd need to anticipate which routes you'd take and where in town you'd like to work for the next x years, so that you could negotiate with dozens of different road management companies. Even if you're talking about long term group rates where a municipality negotiates with the management company, who's going to hold a company to the contract. They'll do what every government contractor today does and lowball the estimate. Then when they say they have to raise prices, if you try to hold them to it, they'll just end up in bankruptcy court. What's to stop regional and even national monopolies from forming who own all the roads in an area? Barrier to entry is extremely high, so there's no natural force to prevent this? Seriously I used to be a libertarian bordering on ancap, I know all these arguments, and I know the lure of having a single unified ideological framework that solves all problems. The free market, and the non-aggression principal ain't it. There are too many places where the free market ends up in a local optimum.