The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Transition to Private Roads 289
The problem is, rather, that the owner of the land abutting the
road is compelled to accept this contract, whereas, in an ideal situation,
people can pick and choose which contracts to sign, and
which to avoid. Yes, this is indeed a problem. In the truly free
society, no one is forced to deal with anyone else. And here,
admittedly, the property owner of interior land will have to deal
with the road owner(s) who surround his holdings.
There are two ways to deal with the objection: one valid, the
other not entirely so. Let us consider the invalid argument first.
It is possible to argue that this difficulty is by no means limited
to roads. For example, when the previously nationalized bakery
or butcher shop becomes returned to its proper home, private
enterprise, the people who used to patronize the government-run
provider of these services will have no choice but to become customers
of the new, privately operated firms selling these products.
This claim is strengthened if these are the only such operations
in town, and the next closest purveyor is located hundreds
of miles away. This argument goes some of the way in the direction
of dealing with the objection but does not completely attain
this goal. The kernel of truth in it is that the land owner in question
might conceivably not be as much inconvenienced by the
transition to private roads as would hold true for the buyers of
these foodstuffs. The latter might actually die, if alternative
sources of food were not attainable; the landlocked homeowner
need suffer no such fate, given that due consideration is given to
the blockade issue.
Where this argument fails, however, is that, still, the blockaded
owner is compelled by law to deal with the new road owner
abutting his property, and this is simply not true for the grocery
shopper. And this, despite the fact that the latter might die as a
result of the privatization, and cannot occur, arguendo, in the case
of the former. That is, we must distinguish between dying as a
result of privatization, a scenario we are contemplating merely
for the sake of logical argument, and being forced by law to deal
with a firm, regardless of the outcome in terms of life expectancy.
The objection we are now considering concerns only the latter
issue; thus, no resort to the former can fully answer it.