Only if the local provider will sell.
That's the beauty of it: bankruptcy has a way of forcing the owner to sell. Exactly what makes the government so dangerous is that it never goes bankrupt. If worst comes to worst, it will just print more money.
It's true that a jillionaire could, in theory, buy up the roads of a certain town just to deny everyone passage. Under road socialism, he can still strangle a town--he only needs to be
slightly more creative. For example, he could buy up all the shopping centers within X miles and shut 'em all down. The anti-walmart crowd claims that Walmart creates "ghost towns" by doing almost exactly that: out-compete the other stores until Walmart is the only one standing. The claim is bogus, but a vengeful billionaire could do that if he really wanted to.
The evil billionaire could
not shut the country down that way, though. The costs rise fast, especially when neighbors see what just happened to Victimville. They'll pay almost anything to keep their road supplier from selling out to Predatorpike, and the value of roads would be bid way beyond Predatorpike's ability to pay.
Bottom line: a "monopoly" is much, much harder to create or sustain than people imagine. There are all sorts of countermeasures that can destroy the would-be monopolist. That's why governments cut out the BS and secure their monopolies with guns and prisons.
Since that was probably an unexpected development at the time of sale to Evil Road Corp, they don't put markers in to keep costs down. What recourse do people living there have? Again, property values go down, and the people there are stuck.
The drop in property values would in turn hurt Evil Road Corp. When you run a fast-food joint in a slum, you can't charge high prices. That's why businesses
do modernize. Government doesn't, or does so much more slowly, because they don't care about profit and loss. They can raise prices and then shoot anyone who refuses to pay.
The argument that cable and phone are "natural monopolies" is the same argument that roads are: namely, that it's prohibitively expensive to "duplicate infrastructure," so the one to lay wires first becomes a monopolist. You can easily see through this argument when it comes to wires;
Fiber can be run parallel to all the other fiber/copper crap already in place.
Not if the company that owns the poles refuses to let them. But in any case, that's a huge fixed cost which the first company doesn't face. So, the argument goes, the competitors have no choice but to charge more in order to cover the infrastructure cost which the first company has already paid. Hence, the first-comer always out-competes newcomers, and competition is impossible. That's the "natural monopoly" argument in a nutshell.
And it's identical to the road argument. Namely, the first-comer has the easements and roadway; the newcomer would (it's claimed) need to buy up property or easements to set up a separate, competing network of roads.
And both arguments are wrong for the same basic reasons. Road "competition" doesn't mean two distinct sets of roads, any more than phone "competition" means two distinct sets of wires. Airlines are one competitor of highways, just as cell phones are one competitor of landlines. "Competition" is a much more complex landscape than most people's simplistic image of two identical products side-by-side on a shelf.
--Len.
