I recently got into an argument with a guy who calls himself an “anarcho-capitalist”: a person who believes the government does not need to exist and that the free-market can replace every service governments usually provide.

It’s a very fringe view, but I usually try to make it a point to challenge my own views from every angle possible to ensure I’m confident in my own positions. My go-to argument against these types is to point out the basic fact that large-scale networked infrastructure projects (such as the interstate) need a central government to bear the costs of establishing and coordinating them. A road network built up entirely by a free market of various road companies competing against each other would be pure chaos. Just look at the mess that comes out of tech consortiums any time they try to establish a standard.

He was quick to push back against this point, citing this blogpost which argues that the free-market is perfectly capable of building roads. They point to the Swedish road network as a real-world example of private roads in practice:

Two-thirds of roads in Sweden are privately operated and managed by local Private Road Associations (PRAs). These road associations are composed of homeowners who live along private roads. An estimated 140,000 kilometers (about 87,000 miles) of roads are the responsibility of 60,000 PRAs.

I’m usually pretty credulous (probably to a fault), I’ll believe a factual claim someone provides and focus my arguing on trying to deal with the logical consequences of whatever fact is cited. But even this was very hard for me to swallow. I started doing some digging, and instantly, within a couple minutes of Googling, found out that there was some seriously missing context.

The Swedish road network measures 419,000 kilometers (see Table 1). The Swedish National Road Administration (SNRA) manages one quarter of the network (98,000 kilometers), and the municipalities 10 percent (38,000 kilometers). The remaining two-thirds (283,000 kilometers) are privately owned and managed roads. The SNRA roads carry 70 percent of the traffic, the municipal roads 26 percent of the traffic, and the private roads the remaining 4 percent of the traffic.

Turns out this private road network only carries four percent of Sweden’s traffic. And on top of that these roads were built as appendages to a state-planned road network that was already put into place.

After World War Two, with the increased use of heavy vehicles and cars, the owners of the private road network started to complain about the increased road damage caused by the growing traffic from the mechanization of farming and forestry, and from small and medium industries. Around the same time, demand increased for the construction of more and better roads in previously undeveloped areas. (The steady improvements in living standards enabled more households to purchase summer and weekend homes and cars.) Many of these areas were of interest also to people who did not own properties there.7 As a result, private road owners increasingly demanded compensation from government for the additional maintenance burden. A road network administration became necessary and in the beginning of the 1950s, parliament instructed SNRA to design a system whereby the state would compensate private road owners for the public use of private roads.

On top of that, these private roads tend to be worse, having to depend on government assistance to cover maintenance anyways. To add insult to injury, apparently most of these roads aren’t even for public use anyways.

Having failed to convince me on the Sweden issue, he also cited medieval Ireland as another example of working private road systems. Another minute of Googling later, I noticed another problem: these weren’t even roads.

It is important to remember that unlike, for example, Roman roads, these medieval routes were not essentially physical entities—thin strips of land with physical boundaries; rather they were rights of way, sometimes with legal and traditional status. Routes tended to follow the line of least resistance, twisting and turning to avoid poorly drained areas and land that was easily overlooked. Where there was a hill to climb or a difficult area to pass through, multiple tracks would develop, the traveller taking the easiest route. Routes may also have varied seasonally as changing weather affected the condition of the pathway.

With that resolved, the conversation had nowhere else to go. I’m not particularly sure I got much out of it, but I did get to go down a rabbithole about roads. Moral of the story? Don’t automatically believe every talking point you read on the internet.