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by slavboj 1231 days ago
Infrastructure provides public benefits way in excess of the private benefit to the users, which is why roads have been public projects for millennia. People generally travel on roads to get somewhere and do something, and given increased state capacity, that thing is overwhelmingly likely to be taxable.

Toll roads are a holdover from times of reduced state capacity when the best and only way to tax something was to force it to go through a physical chokepoint.

1 comments

If the thing they use the infrastructure to do is actually valuable, then they can just add the cost of the toll to what they charge for doing it. Splitting the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure among users is, I believe, the fairest way, and helps to avoid market distortions.