Roads and Money

My latest at The Partial Observer: Roads and Money - Why government control isn't necessary.

Excerpt:

I live in the country. There are half-a-dozen routes to the town where I do most of my business. Anyone willing to cut down some trees, pave over a little cropland, and build a small bridge over a narrow river could produce any number of even more direct routes.

St. Louis and Atlanta are roughly 550 miles from each other. David D. Friedman writes in The Machinery of Freedom that in the late 19th Century, there were 20 different railroad routes between St. Louis and Atlanta. This undermines the idea that roads or railroads form some kind of natural monopoly.