Living in a Libertarian Paradise

We made it to mainland Mexico and we’re currently in a hotel in Guadalajara. One of the weird things about mainland Mexico is the toll roads. The ferry we took from La Paz, Baja California Sur landed in Mazatlan, which is in Sinaloa, a state that’s generally considered not the safest. So we high-tailed it south to Tepic, Nayarit, then Tequila, Jalisco, then Guadalajara, Jalisco. All of that was on toll roads, which are nice by Mexican standards, well patrolled, and very expensive. The stretch from Mazatlan to Tepic, Nayarit, is 170 miles and the toll was 1,010 Mexican Pesos, which is $56.

In addition to being expensive, the toll amounts are weird. They’re not 200 or 300 pesos, they’re 204 or 309 or some other odd number. I can’t imagine how the toll authority keeps the booths stocked with change. As in the US, there’s also electronic tolling, if you have a transponder.

So, overall, a giant pain in the ass. As far as I’m concerned, it’s stupid. I think roads should be financed with taxes, and I also think that public transit should be free. Taxes exist to provide common goods. If you want to have heavy trucks, for example, “pay their share“ because they tend to destroy roads, gas taxes can take care of that. There’s no need to spin up an entire tolling infrastructure just to have a road or a bridge.

But toll roads are exactly what an ideal libertarian world would have, in spades. The dumb libertarian asks “Why should I pay for a road that I might not use?” Similarly, why should they pay for water that they might not drink? Mexico also has that covered, because the water infrastructure sucks, so even in some cities residents have water cisterns that are filled from water trucks, and residents buy purified water from an “agua purificada” which uses reverse osmosis to purify the generally undrinkable water.

The really stupid part of the whole libertarian enterprise is that their desire not to pay for anything they might not use leads to some of the most wasteful and hidebound bureaucracy imaginable. Every toll we paid on the Mexican toll roads was accompanied by an itemized receipt detailing which government entity received their portion of the toll. In New York State, the Thruway, a toll road, recently remodeled their rest stops to make them far less appealing than the older stops (smaller and more cramped), and the Thruway Authority decided to contract with Chick-fil-A to be one of restaurants in the rest stop, even though that restaurant is famously closed on Sundays.

I guess the long and short of it is that there’s very little that’s practical about libertarianism, though I think we all knew that already.