A free market requires the possibility of competition to create efficiency and any of the other benefits of a free market. The nature of infrastructure is that building two copies of it, which you would need in order for the kind of true competition that brings about the benefits of the free market, is an inefficiency that dwarfs any efficiencies you could possibly hope to achieve through competition. There is no way to build two sets of roads everywhere so that different road-building companies can compete on service (and besides, the necessity of all those roads being built on property owned by those companies would mean they would have to have enormous amounts of capital just tied up in owning the land, it would be vastly more expensive for everybody). And if you've looked at your bill from Comcast lately and compared it to the prices of equivalent service in other countries, you would know that privately-owned utilities with no competition and no regulation will overcharge for their services relative to the cost of providing them. The only reason that private electricity generation is available at a reasonable price is because the government regulates it to keep the price close to the cost of generation. Because, again, running two sets of power lines to every building would be a gigantic inefficiency.
To summarize: There is no way to have privately owned and operated infrastructure in a way that is both maximally efficient in terms of total resources required to implement it, and provided to the consumer at a competitive price. It just can't happen, and this is why infrastructure is best implemented by a non-profit entity such as government.
You see, if you paid for services, you could just buy them in the free market, you are not looking for that, you are looking for subsidized services, so that you, personally, do not have to pay for them
I do pay for them... Through taxes, you see. I pay for the infrastructure that allows me to do business exactly proportionally with the amount of financial benefit I am able to receive from access to that infrastructure. You call this "theft," I call it "thank god I live in a country where I don't have to pay a toll every time I go out for a drive."
Besides, assuming that an employee and employer are mutually benefitted by their employment arrangement (a big stretch, employers typically have far, far more negotiating power, but for the sake of this debate I will say that their relationship is mutual since that's something you would agree with), the employer benefits *just as much* from the employee's ability to drive to work as the employee does themselves. If a business has, say, 30 employees, it would be fair to ask that business to pay 30 times as much toward those roads than any individual employee is paying, either by paying for the roads directly or by increasing employee salaries.
So you see, even under your private infrastructure arrangement, the cost would mostly be borne by business owners, because they are the ones who benefit most financially from having access to that infrastructure for themselves and their employees. Except with private infrastructure, it would cost the society more due to overhead involved in individually billing a lot of people for individual use. It's a lot more efficient for the society to build one set of infrastructure, levy taxes that pay for all of it, and let the actual providers of that infrastructure focus on providing it rather than worrying about how to monetize it.
Scandinavia went through its own huge recession 20 years ago, to fix it they started moving in the direction of freer market, the opposite direction from the one you are moving towards.
A freer market, yes, but still a massive welfare state. These are not mutually exclusive, and in fact a welfare state and the large tax burden it brings (Denmark's tax burden is around 50% of GDP) can actually create a *freer* market, because individuals have less short term financial pressure. You can turn down an inequitable job offer because you can afford to wait around for a better one, you can devote your time to further schooling without worrying about how to pay for it. At the same time, employers have the right to hire and fire whoever and whenver they wish, and have no minimum wage. There's no need to regulate workers' rights when workers have the true financial freedom to not accept work that they find inequitable.
And I don't want to live in Scandinavia, by the way, they export natural resources while they can get them out of the ground, that welfare will end, they will have the same problem that the rest of Europe has then.
Most of Denmark's economy is service industry and government. It'll survive peak oil better than Saudi Arabia will.
Also Somalia isn't a 'libertarian utopia', there is no protection of private property in Somalia
If people can pay on an individual basis for basic infrastructure, why can't people pay on an individual basis for protection of their private property? Surely if anarcho-capitalism could actually work in practice, we would actually see it work in practice in areas with no effective government?
But no, what actually happens in the absence of centralized power is a situation where a whole bunch of people fight each other to become the new centralized power. That's how humans work.
