New Hampshire to Consider Withdrawing from RGGI

In response to my post of 8:59 PM on 26 December (see above), at 5:49 AM on 27 December, kcrucible had written:

Yes, but….
Government exists to do that which is beneficial to the vast majority, but which isn’t feasible to be done by solitary actors. Police and military are one example, which you cite.

Other examples would include the paved road system. Corporate entities would have no incentive to build or maintain the road system (which was a HUGE boon to the US) back when created, and even today with modernization, every single road out there would be a toll road. While it might be cheaper in total dollar amounts collected to service it, additional expenses would accumulate from wasted gas sitting in lines, lost productive time, etc. Cheaper isn’t always better (though cheaper doesn’t always mean inferior either!)

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And there’s a lamentable lack of perspicuity on the part of krucible.
I’m not just a libertarian, but I’m also a military history buff – indeed, a wargamer with a history of work in wargames design and development – resident in New Jersey, an area of critical military importance during the early years of the American Revolution. “Light Horse Harry” Lee earned his nickname roaming the countryside where I grew up and now live.
Roads – and how they get built, krucible – are items which lifelong military history types like me tend very strongly to learn about. Tactically, strategically, and especially logistically, roads are critically important, especially when considering the military conflicts conducted over the portion of these United States east of the Appalachians during the 18th and 19th Centuries. Bear with me.
Come to New Jersey or Virginia or Pennsylvania, and you will find a helluva lot of roads named “turnpike” or “pike” or “plank road.” Apart from modern constructions – like the famous New Jersey Turnpike – every damned one of these roads was originally laid out, built, and operated by private industry intent upon making some kind of profit.
They were only taken over by county and state governments much later.
Many of these privately-constructed roads figured large in America’s military history. On 2 May 1863, for example, Jackson’s corps of the Army of Northern Virginia hit the flank of the northern aggressors’ Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville and rolled up XI Corps like a cheap rug. The axis of their assault was the Orange Plank Road, a considerably corduroy’d wagon road that had been constructed by private businessmen to bring lumber and produce to the river port of Fredericksburg, whence shipment could be made by way of the Rappahannock to Chesapeake Bay and markets beyond.
Yes, many of these privately-constructed and operated thoroughfares were run as toll roads charging user fees. But just what the hell makes you think that government-built and government-operated roads are free, anyway? The plain fact of the matter – ever heard the expression “TANSTAAFL? – is that the costs are not only paid but exorbitantly overpaid (a tremendous source of graft and cause of government corruption all over the nation but particularly here in “the Soprano Strate”), chiefly by way of huge excise taxes levied on the sale of petrochemical fuels, with subsequent expenditure wastage on scales which ought to beggar your imagination.
To give you a starting point, the Cato Institute has been focusing upon the arguments for and against the privatization of government-mismanaged “public goods” for decades. They’ve aggregated historical and current information on the roles played by private businesses in road building and operation throughout that time, including a 2005 Policy Analysis paper on the federal highway system. Their stuff is freely accessible online. All you need invest is a bit of time and effort.
My personal concerns with civil governments handling road building and maintenance run beyond any purely ethical consideration (why in hell are armed thugs operating public thoroughfares and – in the bargain – collecting funds at gunpoint to do such a lousy job at it?) and into the simple and straightforward conclusion that by taking decisions for an economically critical activity out of the private sector and into the realm of politics, they’re making abysmally wrong decisions which waste resources and leave genuine needs unmet.
In short, government road-building doesn’t do – hell, it cannot do – what really could and should be done with regard to getting people and materials from one place to another. Worse, government usurpation of the road-building function forecloses the options which can be provided by private enterprise.
Hmph. Not that privately owned and operated roads must charge tolls for their use. Take note of how private businesses operate parking lots (at malls and such) for the convenience of their customers. They don’t charge for parking space. In the past half-century the growth of shopping malls (and the stark decline of inner-city commercial districts) illustrates how the easy availability of such parking has been figured into consumer preferences. When was the last time you dropped a quarter (and more) into a downtown city-operated parking meter in order to shop there?
Many businesses in the past have built roads to suit their own purposes – to convey resources into their shops, to conduct finished products out, and to give access to their customers. They don’t give a damn about free riders, generally because anybody driving the roads they’d built was certain (in one way or another) to serve the builders’ commercial benefit.
For pity’s sake, krucible, learn something about a subject like this before you write stuff like:

I have libertarian leanings, but there are some things which are clearly the provenance of government, simply because they can afford to take the “big picture” approach to a problem and not have to tell shareholders that it will take 30 years for a project to pay for itself, when the shareholders are concerned about the quarter-to-quarter profits of the company.

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In fact, it is the officers of civil government who – by making decisions based preponderantly upon considerations of political advantage – obliterate “the ‘big picture’ approach to a problem” and reduce every activity they pervert to the realm of economically nonviable waste.
Your adverse perception, krucible, of “shareholders…concerned about the quarter-to-quarter profits of the company” appears to be the result of inadequate education on the subject, almost certainly compounded by your largely uncritical receipt of duplicitous propaganda foisted upon you by your teachers (probably government-paid thugs) and the complicit consciously collectivist government-worshiping lamestream media.