Warrantied Roads

» Prometheus - It's not as simple as Beth presents.

Shocking. A libertarian who isn't calling for
privatization of the roads. :-)

Of course, the obvious questions are not answered
by Beth's article, the ones that would allow us to
decide whether her proposal makes sense.

For example, Beth claims that other states, that
are not using the warranteed roads approach have
better roads. Well then, what are they doing
differently?

It may also be that warranteed roads are NOT a good
economic bargain, for the same reason that extended
warrantees from other manufacturers are often not
a good bargain. Without an extensive economic
analysis, it is hard to tell whether the government
should self-insure, the road builder should self-insure,
the road-builder should shop for insurance, or
the vehicle owner should buy insurance.

And no matter which of those options is chosen,
if the goal is to minimize the total
amount of money spent on repairs of roads and
repairs to vehicles, it is not obvious from the
little information in her article whether
the present situation is optimal or not.
Indeed, a "zero potholes" warrantee might cost much
more than repairs from a few potholes.

Warrantees are a valid option to consider. But
the fact is that the logic of accountability does
not work by itself: it MUST be based in a quantitative
analysis of the total costs of the various alternatives.
With 50 states and numerous other smaller
governments in the road construction and
maintenance business, we have an enormous industy
exploring many different alternatives

-- posted by Prometheus

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