America's “Free” Market: the Cumberland Road

The first government-built road in the US was the Cumberland Road started in 1811. Most people today assume it's the government's job to build roads, but who was building all the roads in America prior to 1811?

It was handled privately, by markets of people. And it made sense to do it: if store owners wanted more people to visit their stores, they needed to make access easier. So that's what people did. This was a market force at work because merchants had an incentive to provide access.

But starting in 1811, and building on from there, the market was no longer able to determine where roads would be most useful. And the market was no longer able to allocate resources for the maintenance of roads. Slowly, that job was taken over by government, allowing the type of bureaucratic red tape that results in the poor maintenance of roads – the potholes and lane misallocations and cost overruns that we see today.