I assume you have a reputable cite for this.
There is no freedom to pay it’s workers whatever they want, nor any real belief in one outside a few conservative wet dreams.
There is, however, a belief a full time worker is entitled to a basic livable wage for their labor, as shown by labor laws.
No engineering job has ever been done on time or under budget. Maybe civil.
In Peru we used to have a state-run phone company for the whole country. Telephone calls were ridiculously cheap, but there was a catch. If you wanted a phoneline you had to way for years, 10 or 12 were common. You’d see adds selling telephone numbers. Few people outside big cities had access to a phone. Politically it was important to get the price as low as possible.
In the early 1990s it was privatised. Now phone coverage is very high, there are cell phones even in very poor places and towns with 100 people get internet.
Benefit for everyone.
There is no upper limit. But there is a lower limit based on supply and demand.
Let’s say I own a garage and I need to hire a car mechanic. I am free to pay any wage I want, down to a certain point. If I advertise the position, and I say I will pay $100/hour, I will get a ton of responses. Too many, in fact. So $100/hour is much too high. If I advertise the position and I say I will pay $25/hour, I will still get a lot of responses. So $25/hour is probably too high. If I say I will pay $10/hour, and no competent mechanic applies for the job, then $10/hour is too low. I discover that $15/hour is the lowest price a competent mechanic is willing to work for, hence the wage should be $15/hour.
A wage is nothing more than a price, and it should be determined solely by supply and demand. It’s a beautiful system.
May we step away from the idelogical posturing for a moment and get back to the original question?
I suggest everyone check out the annual report for Cintra. It’s the Spanish-based company that runs the Chicago Skyway, Indiana Toll Road, M4 in England and several other well-known ventures.
Leaving aside that 2008 was a bad year for the company, financially speaking, Cintra does give some hints on how it expects to make money, including the rapid conversion of the road to using EZ-Pass or other electronic collection systems, and at least in the case of the Chicago Skyway, increasing tolls each year (even though traffic on the Skyway actually dropped in 2008.)
So, it’s not that they are that much more efficient, it’s just that they don’t hesitate to raise tolls to make a profit.
As to how they make money in general while your typically highway is a money-sucking pit, Cintra’s pretty upfront about that, too.
In other words, they aren’t saying they can outcompete, rather than they know how to make money with limited competition and a long-term investment/payback. A couple of paragraphs later, the company explains it will “rotate assets” that fall short of expectations. In other words, they’ll walk away – something a state Department of Highways can’t normally do.
What does Florida (or anywhere else, for that matter) get out of the deal? Immediate cash infusion. Chciago got $1.83 billion and Indiana got $3.8 billion (upfront) for handing over their operations.
Not every highway department is looking to privatization. Ohio has resisted efforts to privatize its turnpike operations, which continue to return a modest surplus each year.
I doubt you’re a boss; bosses don’t waste time chatting on Internet message boards with the hoi polloi. In the Wobblies the term we use for folks like you is “scissorbill.” I will leave it to you to discover why.
Yeah, people who pay wages are strange, alien creatures, living apart from the masses of decent humanity; neither Crafter_Man nor any of the rest of us could ever possibly be in such a situation as to own a garage and set out to hire a mechanic for a certain price, as in the given example.