The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

116 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
Ross does point out a practical problem: “As a practical matter,
utility of service or value of service cannot be used as a basis
for pricing highway services to the highway user except in the
very limited case of toll roads.” But modern innovations in electronic
counting mechanisms and computers have taken the force
out of this argument, if it was ever valid. We must conclude that
the external benefits in this case are, in the words of Brownlee and
Heller, “illusions arising from failure to charge highway users
appropriately for the services provided by the highway system.”
Let us take a quite different case. An attractive woman sauntering
down the street in a miniskirt provides an external benefit.
22 She is a delight to other pedestrians, yet she is unable to
charge them for these viewing pleasures. 23 The recipients,
according to the theory, however, are the “free riders,” who benefit
without paying their “fair share” of the costs. Ought they to
be forced to pay? Although examples cited by the advocates of
the view that free riders ought to be made to pay for benefits
received are usually far more sober, the miniskirt case is perfectly
analogous. In all cases, the so-called free rider’s benefits come to
him unsolicited. If it is ludicrous to insist that he pay for an uninvited
view of a woman’s legs, it is equally so to insist that he be
charged, via tax payments, for the losses accompanying “transport
of all types.” 24 And to call such forced payment “justified,”
22To most males, that is. In the eyes of competitive women, homosexuals,
perhaps, and strict, fundamentalist clergymen, presumably, she is anything
but. (We deal below with the question of one man’s meat being
another’s poison.)
23Even such an externality can be internalized by the ever watchful and
vigilant marketplace. For an account of how this is accomplished by the
management of Maxwell’s Plum restaurant, in New York City, see New York
Magazine, March 1978, and for a similar account involving Sardi’s restaurant,
see United Magazine, November 1982.
24George M. Smerk, Urban Transportation: The Federal Role (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1965), p. 230, writes: “As the general public benefits
from an increased supply of transport of all types, tax receipts from the
general public may with justice be used to make up losses.”