It means that markets rely on the rule of law. From monopoly regulation to the prohibition on outright theft, markets literally cannot exist without governance.
> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good) is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous.
If you ever sat in a traffic jam, you will have experienced that road use is rivalrous. And toll roads show that it's rather easy to exclude people from using roads.
Building roads with general taxpayer money and making them available without payment by the users might or might not be good policy. I don't know. But roads ain't a public good.
Most roads are difficult to exclude. Most spend most of their time with excess capacity and are not rivalrous. They're clearly not a typical private good.
And they're usually a natural monopoly, too. Not to mention that the acquisition of land to make a road is often problematic.
Basically, there's a lot of reasons to expect market failure in a market for roads. That's not to say the only solution is for the government to provide them, but that laissez-faire, completely hands off solutions are probably not going to turn out great.
Nowadays it's fairly easy to exclude people from roads: just put up a sign that says you can only use them if you paid. (You can also use a camera and some machine learning to catch offenders; or otherwise cheap overseans workers who manually review footage.)
> Most [roads] spend most of their time with excess capacity and are not rivalrous.
Most cars sit around idle most of the time. I'm not sure what your argument shows?
> And they're usually a natural monopoly, too. Not to mention that the acquisition of land to make a road is often problematic.
That's a different discussion. Though I'm more optimistic.
They are a massive transfer to public land to whoever occupies the road, and the person occupying the road might not even be in their steel box for days on end.
Well, it depends on how the roads are financed. You are right that roads financed out of general taxation and free to use can be seen as direct or indirect subsidies to the car industry.
But the same physical road, but financed out of user-fees (or by voluntary contributions from nearby shops to attract shoppers etc) by a profit-driven private company, are not subsidies to the car industry.
Or take the hypothetical from the last paragraph, and add massive taxes on top, and all of a sudden it's the opposite of a subsidy. But the physical road stays the same.
How is stopping trucks on the road to check their papers, and holding up the delivery for some period of time, on a semi-random basis, not ‘intervention’ of some kind?
I would argue it 100% is. You can make MUCH more money if you steal or perhaps keep slaves. We're just so used to these preventative measures that we don't really consider them, but this is, in essence, a huge "tax" on the private sector.
Playing by the rules is very expensive as compared to not.
Even if you buy that argument (and I'm skeptical), that's at most an argument for a minimal nightwatchmen state; not for further government intervention.
If you're skeptical about whether governance is required for markets to function, launch your next startup on the darkweb or in a failed state. I fail to see how one could imagine any kind of healthy market operating without basic governance, reliable infrastructure etc. It's a religious idea (anarchocaptialism or something similar) at that point.
Past that, actually engaging with business (as a customer or employee) should be a rapid reminder of how much we have regulation to thank for. From not being poisoned (immediately or over the course of a lifetime) by our food, burned alive by non-fire retardant furniture (and the absence of a fire service), to having weekends off, our wages reliably paid, to being free from physical and the more obvious forms of psychological abuse. It's right there - you engage with the rights and privileges afforded by legislation daily.
Just astonishing to me that this kind of market fundamentalism is still actively engaged in. People can disagree on the extent and fundamental structure of government, but to deny it's role in the basic functioning of business in a society as complex as ours seems outright absurd.
As people get richer they demand better quality stuff and can afford it.
That includes taking weekends off.
It's perfectly legal where I live to work on the weekend. There's also no minimum wage here. Yet, most people get weekends off and get paid more than zero.
It's also entirely legal here to offer jobs without reliable pay (as long as the contract doesn't promise reliable pay).
There's plenty of long term poisonous food available in all countries: you can mainline eg pure sugar to your heart's content. Most people in most countries opt for tastier and healthier fare, because they can afford it. There's also plenty of immediately poisonous substances available, like strong alcohol.
People also regularly opt for more than the legal minimum in terms of furniture safety. Eg Ikea sells you kits to bolt your cabinet to the wall, so it doesn't fall on your child trying to climb up on it. So the legal minimum's don't seem particularly binding: people voluntarily exceed them.
> Just astonishing to me that this kind of market fundamentalism is still actively engaged in. People can disagree on the extent and fundamental structure of government, but to deny it's role in the basic functioning of business in a society as complex as ours seems outright absurd.
Governments do stick their hands into many pies, but that doesn't mean that them doing that is required by some physical or natural law.
> If you're skeptical about whether governance is required for markets to function, launch your next startup on the darkweb or in a failed state.
Yes, governments control some of the best real estate on earth. That doesn't mean they necessarily contributed much to that happy state of affairs; often just the opposite.
Btw, many companies are trying to escape even basic functions provided by government, and are going for private arbitration instead, because it's more efficient.
What does this mean?