The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

220 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
the earth? 8 We would have no definitive answers to any of these
questions, except that we should “wait and see” what the working
of the marketplace churns up. However, had pens always
been in the private sector, we might well attempt to extrapolate
the future story of the pencil from that example, and this is precisely
the tack we shall take in our attempt to foretell the likely
reaction of a completely privatized road industry to the questions
about street and highway discrimination we are addressing. That
is, we shall focus on a related experience, and see if it can shed
any light, however clouded, about possible future road operation.
One answer that might be discerned is that discrimination, if
it does occur, would likely take place on the basis of uncivilized
or obstreperous behavior, not mere skin color (unless the two
were highly correlated, and the latter could be used as a cheap
proxy variable or indicator of the former). Even statist police,
who are sometimes accused of “racial profiling,” rarely if ever
interdict a black grandmother. Rather, they tend to focus on that
subset of this population proportionately over represented in the
crime statistics: males from about ages fifteen to twenty-five, of
whatever race (with the exception of those in this age/gender
cohort who are easily identifiable as being far removed from the
police blotters of the nation, e.g., male teens who are Chasidic, or
Amish, or are wearing clerical collars). As it happens, however,
for reasons that do not concern us at present, 9 different racial and
ethnic groups are differentially represented in terms of such
unwelcome behavior: blacks for ordinary crime, Arabs and Muslims
for terrorism.
8For a very different but not entirely unrelated treatment of the pencil,
see Leonard Read, I, Pencil (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for
Economic Education, 1958).
9For an explanation of this phenomenon see Richard J. Herrnstein and
Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American
Life (New York: Free Press, 1994); Michael Levin, Why Race Matters (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1997).