The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Compromising the Uncompromisable:
Speed Limits, Parades, Cigarettes 211
After all, there are many more of us than there are of them. True,
any one of them might gain more than any one of us might lose,
but when a cost benefit analysis is conducted, wealth can be maximized
by not giving these people an outdoor oxygen tent, as it
were.
The libertarian would concur in this conclusion, but for very
different reasons: because normal people have homesteaded the
right to engage in just these sorts of everyday activities, that if the
invalids venture out of their safe havens, they must do so at their
own peril. 22
So which is it? Is smoking an invasion or not?
Fortunately, it is not necessary to give an answer to this essentially
empirical, scientific and medical question. Thanks to the
compromising, ameliorative qualities of private property rights
regimes, a compromise between these two bitterly contrasting
views is possible.
Property Rights,” American Economic Review 57 (1976): 347–59; idem, “Ethics
and Efficiency in Property Rights Systems, in Time,” in Mario Rizzo, ed.,
Uncertainty and Disequilibrium: Explorations of Austrian Themes (Lexington,
Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1979); Richard Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 3rd ed.
(Boston: Little Brown, 1986). For a critique of these three economists in particular,
and of their “Law and Economic Philosophy” in general, see Block,
“Coase and Demsetz on Private Property Rights”; idem, “Ethics, Efficiency,
Coasean Property Rights and Psychic Income: A Reply to Demsetz,” Review
of Austrian Economics 8, no. 2 (1995): 61–125; Roy E. Cordato, Welfare Economics
and Externalities in an Open Ended Universe: A Modern Austrian Perspective
(Boston: Kluwer, 1992); Elisabeth Krecke, “Law and the Market
Order: An Austrian Critique of the Economic Analysis of Law,” paper presented
at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s Austrian Scholar Conference,
New York City, October 9–11, 1992; Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case
Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Tx.: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990); idem,
The Coase Theorem (Tyler, Texas, Institute for Christian Economics, 1992).
22See John Locke, “An Essay Concerning the True Origin, Extent and End
of Civil Government,” Vols. 27–28, in Peter Laslett, ed., Two Treatises of Government
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); Rothbard, For a
New Liberty; Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property.