The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Roads and the Immigration Issue 217
this “however” is the crux of the argument, not all property is
owned privately at present.
Surprise!, the evil government owns larges swatches of it,
mainly in Alaska and west of the Mississippi, but throughout
every state in the nation, without exception. 5
This being the case, no permission of any extant landlord is
needed. Homesteading is a one-way arrangement, not a two-way
one, such as foreign trade or investment. If Americans act like
sheep and decline to homestead these unowned areas, in defiance
of their government, they can have no proper objection if
foreigners show a bit more initiative and spunk. Nor is the objection
tenable from the anti-immigration perspective that Americans
“really” own these unsettled tracts of land or, worse, that the
government does. For surely it is an uncontroversial premise (at
least within the libertarian community) that the only just source
of private property rights is homesteading, and, thus, anyone
interfering with a homesteader peacefully going about his business
is guilty of the initiation of violence. Since there is no reason
to distinguish between foreign and domestic would-be homesteaders,
the case for precluding the former (or the latter, certainly)
on grounds of trespass vanishes.
How does this argument fit in with the institution of private
roads? Simple. Assume that the foreign homesteaders helicopter
over to unowned (that is, government claimed) land in, say, central
Wyoming, and begin to settle there. Can they enter onto the
private roads, and have surface access to the entire country,
indeed, to all of North America? Or, will they be confined to
5 For example, state and federal government own 95.8 percent of Alaska,
87.8 percent of Nevada, 75.2 percent of Utah and 60.4 percent of Oregon; on
the other hand, east of the Mississippi the holdings are more modest. For
example, 1.5 percent of Rhode Island, 6.2 percent of Connecticut, 6.3 percent
of Massachusetts, 7.4 percent of Delaware and 7.6 percent of Maryland.
For the U.S. as a whole, the figure is 39.8 percent. See on this:
http://www.nwi.org/Maps/LandChart.html