The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Transition to Private Roads 287
But this objection, too, is without merit. First of all, it is by no
means true that road bureaucrats act homogeneously. There is,
after all, such a thing as booty or plunder seeking. 6 That is, typically,
the rich and/or the well organized, which are typically the
same thing, are able to direct more than a proportionate share of
public resources to areas in which they reside, or have business
interests. Thus, what the critics fear in the case of the transition of
roads to private ownership is already a concomitant of the present,
statist system.
Second, there is a difficulty in how the objection is necessarily
posed. It relies on the coherence of “management acting
homogeneously.” Does this imply equal expenditure on the part
of all road owners? Hardly, since money can be well or poorly
spent. Even on the assumption of equal quality of spending
money, whatever that means, in turn, there is still the question of
whether the “equality” is to be normalized for value of the road,
or its length, or length multiplied by number of lanes and their
width, etc. Also, how do we incorporate the differences between
winding roads and straight ones? Those that are well banked,
and those that are not? The concept of “quality” has in most cases
a difficult, subjective element to it, which makes comparison difficult,
and the present case is certainly no exception to this rule.
Does it consist of filling in potholes, reducing the roughness of
the road, the dangers for motorists who use it, the speed with
which one can travel, the congestion levels? If this objection must
be couched in such ambiguous phraseology, it loses much of its
power. The point is, in markets, all of these hard to pin down considerations
are amalgamated in one fell swoop into one statistic:
profit. But this is impossible in the absence of market institutions.
Third, one can only properly own physical property, not the
value thereof. 7 The latter is determined by potentially thousands
of buyers and sellers, any of whom could become the marginal
purchaser or vendor, who actually determines price and hence
7 Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Walter Block, “Property and Exploitation,”
International Journal of Value-Based Management 15, no. 3 (2002): 225–36.