What about the Road?
I am so sick of the objection to Libertarian philosophy, "What about the roads?" The objection is that without the government around there would be no way for people to travel from one place to another. It's a multifaceted objection, but I would like to address one part of it right now.
Recently on a talk radio show to which I'm addicted, Free Talk Live, one of the hosts, Mark, got into a knock done drag out with the own of the other hosts, Ian. It quickly descended into ad hominen attacks. Mark seems to be convinced that without eminent domain and the guns of government, no new roads could ever be built. Ian is dedicated to never using force against others, and so it went.
Now that we are all up to speed, I'm not a Libertarian, and have not taken any non-aggression oath. I don't believe in rights at all, neither the right to property, nor the right to travel. You either have the ability to defend what you call your own or you don't own it at all; you either have the means to travel from one place to another or stay home, but personally I believe that it is wise to conduct oneself on a voluntary basis unless others are putting me in peril and will not respond to reason, and to that end I would like to address the issue of eminent domain.
For our purposes, eminent domain is the ability of the government to take its subjects' property if it chooses with or without compensation by force if necessary. When I was growing up in Michigan on the way to my Grandparents house, my dad pointed out a farm where the house was on one side of the road and the barn was on the other. According to my dad, when the bulldozers arrived to put the road through the middle of this man's farm between his house and his barn, he when into his barn and blew his head off rather than see all that he had saved for and worked for destroyed. Personally, I think he turned the gun on the wrong person, but that's eminent domain.
Good roads are built without any government involvement on private property everyday, to suggest that individuals would not be able to accomplish this basic human need is crazy, but let's look to the marketplace to see what is already happening.
First, because it's the one thing that people think the government is actually good at, way too many roads are built. Many perfectly good homes and businesses are destroyed because a new freeway bypasses their neighborhood. These buildings and homes are condemned to blight and decay. Whole towns and industries have disappeared because of government road building, so if road building is difficult and expensive, that's a good thing.
Second, there is a movement in America to convert old railroad tracks (one of the industries effected by government road building) into recreational trails. The government has placed seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the way of these projects. The organizations that want to do the conversions are often faced with negotiating individual agreements with adjoining land owners to purchase these right-of-ways, in a very short period of time. Often there are several holdouts to the plan and many fall through, but thanks to public pressure on these landholders and generous donations by people who will benefit from the rail trails, many of these recreational trails have been built despite government involvement.
In a world free of government theft, people who would not sell land to a popular road building project might be prevented from traveling on a system of roads held by the organization attempting to build the new road. If he persisted, he might be prevented from using the services of local businesses, electricity, water, etc. It could become very uncomfortable for a person to refuse to sell his property to an organization that was behind a popular transportation project, but if he was an independent fella, he might not care. Many government building projects are decades in the planning. In that length of time the owner might die. In which case likely the property would come up for sale. Would it be so terrible for society to wait for an important piece of property to come up for sale instead of killing it's owner, if he refused to sell when some bureaucrat decided he should.
The people of the world do not need government people, people with guns, to steal their property simply so others can travel from one place to another. We have enough roads already, and people are resourceful enough to solve their transportation problems without killing one another.