The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

8 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
motorists would have to stop every twenty-five feet and put
one-hundredth of a penny in each little old lady’s toll box.
Without eminent domain, there would be all sorts of obstructionists
setting up roadblocks in the oddest places. Chaos, anarchy,
would reign. Traffic would grind to a screeching halt, as
the entire fabric of the economy fell about our ears.
If we were to divide such a statement into its cognitive and
psychological (or emotive) elements, it must be stated right at the
outset that there is nothing at all reprehensible about the intellectual
challenge. Far from it. Indeed, if these charges cannot be satisfactorily
answered, the whole idea of private roads shall have
to be considered a failure.
There is also an emotive element which is responsible, perhaps,
not for the content of the objection, but for the hysterical
manner in which it is usually couched and the unwillingness,
even, to consider the case. The psychological component stems
from a feeling that government road management is inevitable
and that any other alternative is therefore unthinkable. It is this
emotional factor that must be flatly rejected.
We must realize that just because the government has
always10 built and managed the roadway network, this is not
necessarily inevitable, the most efficient procedure, nor even justifiable.
On the contrary, the state of affairs that has characterized
the past is, logically, almost entirely irrelevant. Just because “we
have ‘always’ exorcised devils with broomsticks in order to cure
disease” does not mean that this is the best way.
We must ever struggle to throw off the thralldom of the status
quo. To help escape “the blinds of history” consider this statement
by William C. Wooldridge:
10 Strictly speaking, this is far from the truth. Before the nineteenth century,
most roads and bridges in England and the U.S. were built by quasiprivate
stock companies.