The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Free-Market Transportation: Denationalizing the Roads 9
Several years ago I was a student at St. Andrews University in
Scotland, and I found that placing a telephone call constituted
one of the environment’s greatest challenges. Private phones
were too expensive to be commonplace, so a prospective telephoner
first had to accumulate four pennies for each call he
desired to make, a project complicated by the absence of any
nearby commercial establishment open beyond the hour of six
or seven. Next, the attention of an operator had to be engaged,
in itself a sometimes frustrating undertaking, whether because
of inadequate manpower or inadequate enthusiasm on the
switchboard I never knew. Finally, since the landward side of
town apparently boasted no more telephones than the seaward,
a long wait frequently followed even a successful connection,
while whoever had answered the phone searched out the party
for whom the call was intended. A few repetitions of this routine
broke my telephone habit altogether, and I joined my fellow
students in communicating in person or by message when
it was feasible, and not communicating at all when it was not.
Nevertheless, the experience rankled, so I raised the subject one
night in the cellar of a former bishop’s residence, which now
accommodates the student union’s beer bar. Why were the telephones
socialized? Why weren’t they a privately owned utility,
since there was so little to lose in the way of service by denationalization?
The reaction was not, as might be expected, in the least defensive,
but instead positively condescending. It should be selfevident
to even a chauvinistic American that as important a
service as the telephone system could not be entrusted to private
business. It was inconceivable to operate it for any other
than the public interest. Who ever had heard of a private telephone
company?
That incredulity slackened only slightly after a sketchy introduction
to Mother Bell (then younger and less rheumatic than
today), but at least the American company’s example demonstrated
that socialized telephone service was not an invariable
given in the equation of the universe. My friends still considered
the private telephone idea theoretically misbegotten and
politically preposterous, but no longer could it remain literally