The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Public Goods and Externalities: The Case of Roads 117
as is often done, is to be guilty of a clear violation of wertfrei or
value-free economics. No value judgments whatsoever logically
follow from strictly economic postulates. Since we are here concerned
only with what economics, not ethics, can teach us, we do
not consider the question of what, if anything, would justify the
extraction of coercive payments from free riders. We must content
ourselves with the observation that the receipt of unsolicited
services certainly cannot do so.
If the free-rider argument were really valid, it would open up
a Pandora’s box of truly monumental proportions. For example,
a hoodlum could approach anyone walking along some street,
smile at him, 25 and then ask the recipient of the smile for a payment
of any arbitrary amount (for the value of the benefit that the
free rider supposedly enjoys has not been established by any proponent
of this view). If the honest burgher refuses to pay, the
hoodlum has as much (or as little) right to force him to do so as
does Smerk, or his agents, the government, to compel the average
citizen to pay for the benefits he receives from “transport of
all types.”
The so-called free-rider problem would not be limited, however,
to such fanciful examples, for our lives are riddled with
such phenomena. As Murray Rothbard has written:
The difficulty with this argument is that it proves far too much.
For which one of us would earn anything like our present real
income were it not for external benefits that we derive from the
actions of others? Specifically, the great modern accumulation
of capital goods is an inheritance from all the net savings of our
ancestors. Without them, we would, regardless of the quality of
our own moral character, be living in a primitive jungle. The
inheritance of money capital from our ancestors is, of course,
25 Or do anything else, whatsoever, that could theoretically be interpreted
as being of benefit to the free rider. Remember, it has not been proven that
the free rider must admit to being a beneficiary. Smerk and other writers
have been willing merely to assume that the general public benefits from an
increased supply of transport.