The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Free-Market Transportation: Denationalizing the Roads 13
allowed to earn a profit. They can prosper and expand. Entrepreneurs
who fail to satisfy, on the other hand, are soon driven to
bankruptcy.
This is a continual process repeated day in, day out. There is
always a tendency in the market for the reward of the able and
the deterrence of those who are not efficient. Nothing like perfection
is ever reached, but the continual grinding down of the
ineffective and rewarding of the competent, brings about a level
of managerial skill unmatched by any other system. Whatever
may be said of the political arena, it is one which completely
lacks this market process. Although there are cases where capability
rises to the fore, there is no continual process which promotes
this.
Because this is well known, even elementary, we have
entrusted the market to produce the bulk of our consumer goods
and capital equipment. What is difficult to see is that this analysis
applies to the provision of roads no less than to fountain pens,
frisbees, or fishsticks.
AFREE MARKET IN ROADS
Let us now turn to a consideration of how a free market in
roads might operate. 13 Along the way, we will note and counter
the intellectual objections to such a system. All transport thoroughfares
would be privately owned: not only the vehicles,
buses, trains, automobiles, trolleys, etc., that travel upon them,
but the very roads, highways, byways, streets, sidewalks,
bridges, tunnels, and crosswalks themselves upon which journeys
take place. The transit corridors would be as privately
owned as is our fast food industry.
13 The present author wishes to express a debt of gratitude to the two
trailblazers into this subject: Jarret B. Wollstein, Public Services under Laissez
Faire (New York: Arno Press, 1974), and Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty
(New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 202–18.