The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

118 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
simply inheritance of shares in this capital structure. We are all,
therefore, free riders on the past. We are also free riders on the present,
because we benefit from the continuing investment of our fellow
men and from their specialized skills on the market. Certainly
the vast bulk of our wages, if they could be so imputed,
would be due to this heritage on which we are free riders. The
landowner has no more of an unearned increment than any one
of us. Are all of us to suffer confiscation, therefore, and to be
taxed for our happiness? And who then is to receive the loot?
Our dead ancestors who were our benefactors in investing the
capital? 26
PUBLIC GOODS
Another line of attack on the possibility of a free market in
roads is that centered around the concept of “public” or “collective”
goods. A pure public good is defined by Haritos as one,
such as an outdoor circus, or national defense, “which all enjoy
in common in the sense that each individual’s consumption of
such goods leads to no subtraction from any other individual’s
consumption of that good.” 27 The polar opposite of this is the
pure “private consumption good, like bread, whose total can be
parceled out among two or more persons, with one man having
a loaf less if another gets a loaf more.” 28
Samuelson acknowledges the polar aspects of this partition
of goods:
Obviously I am introducing a strong polar case . . . . The careful
empiricist will recognize that many—though not all—of the
26Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic
Principles (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1962), pp. 888–89; emphasis
added.
27Z. Haritos, “Theory of Road Pricing,” Transportation Journal (Spring,
1974): 54.
28Paul A. Samuelson, “Diagrammatic Exposition of a Theory of Public
Expenditure,” Review of Economics and Statistics (November 1955): 350.