The left and right side of the road

The act of driving your car on a public street is an example of a successful blend of capitalism and socialism. The car is capitalist. Private companies had to compete for your purchase. In most cases (at least in non-communist countries), the car was probably not made by the government. Even if it was, you probably had a choice to buy one that wasn't.

The road, on the other hand, is socialist. In most cases, you didn't pay to drive on that road. Even if you did, the toll was probably collected by a government. Even if the construction company that built it was a private company, the government probably decided where it would go, and paid for it.

It's obvious why the car is capitalist. The constant competition between car makers forces them to improve or fail. Most 'socialist' cars are imfamous for there poor quality, such as the East german 'Trabant' and the Russian 'Lada'. The 'Lada' was actually designed by Fiat, the soviet government was responsible only for making poor quality copies of the Fiat design.

But even in Mississippi, one of the least socialist states of one of the least socialist nations, the government is still building the roads. There are many reasons for this, the first and foremost of which is that building roads isn't that profitable. Furthermore, since roads are immobile, the customer probably won't get many choices as to which road to take. You can get from Vicksburg to Jackson in one of several hundred different models of car, but only a few paths will take you there. The government builds roads because all people agree that they are necessary, but the business model of building roads doesn't favor competition or profit, both of which are central to capitalism.

There are other examples of this sort of symbiosis. Airports are huge, expensive things, well beyond what most companies could afford to build. So the governments build them, but the planes are may be made by free enterprise and the airlines can be private too.

Infrastructure has a way of favoring monopolies and governments. Even private infrastructures, like the wireline phone network, tend to be run by burdensome monopolies, which are much like the government in their behavior. In the US, however, there is a difference between the government and companies like Verizon: You get to vote on who runs the government. So it may actually make sense for the government to stay in the infrastructure business and maybe even branch into new infrastructure markets.

The 'cars on roads' model could work for power generation. Let private companies run powerplants while the government keeps the transmission lines going. And dispense with any stupid rules about how high the rates are and forcing users to pay 'stranded costs'(costs that legacy companies blew on previous power plant construction). Companies and people can buy from the grid and sell to the grid. A company just has to make sure that the juice that they are generating matches the juice that their customers are buying. The government, being accountable to the voters, keeps the connections going.

Perhaps the abominable Amtrak situation could be done with a 'cars on roads' model. While the government maybe should not be running Amtrack, maybe the government could build and buy rail lines and sell access on them to all the freight and passenger lines that choose to use them. Then passenger lines could have a chance on their own rather than facing unfair competion from Amtrak. Amtrak in some cases has to rely on freight tracks owned by other companies. In this case the 'road' is capitalist and the 'car' is socialist. It's like driving a Trabant on a private toll road! Needless to say, it's not working very well.

Perhaps in this age of smog and traffic jams, some people will say that driving isn't the best form of transportation. However, in spite of this, no other transportation arrangement has ever been so successful or popular. It's because you control the car at the dealer, and, perhaps, control the road at the voting booth.

Political Balance

In the classic definitions, liberals are those who want change, and conservatives are those who want things to be the way they are, or even the way that they were before. To be perfectly conservative is to never advance. To be perfectly liberal to to abandon everything that has gone before, and replace it with new things. Therefore, to reap the benefits of technological and social advancement while preserving those things that have stood the test of time requires an enlightened sense of balance. This takes more thought and discussion, but nothing in this world is as simple as the politicians would have us believe.