The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

332 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
laissez-faire capitalism for roads, say, 50,000 would perish; then,
far from the government being liable for any deaths at all, it
would be credited for saving 10,000 per year. Alternatively, suppose
that with private property highway firms managing this
resource, only 15,000 would lose their lives. Then, by subtracting
this amount from the extant figure (40,000 – 15,000 = 25,000) we
deduce that government was responsible for killing only 25,000,
not 40,000 people.
Let us now attempt to analyze this situation and lay blame
for highway fatalities where it belongs. We do the blaming, not
for the sake of blaming, but, rather, in an attempt to ameliorate
conditions. We can scarcely achieve improvement if we are not
clear as to the cause of this calamity of roadside deaths.
So, is it likely that private enterprise would be run more efficiently
in this regard than the public sector and thus kill fewer
people? It is difficult to definitively arrive at any such conclusion,
since what we are involved in is a contrary-to-fact conditional: at
present, government owns and manages the roads. But if this
were not so, and if, instead of the status quo, somehow entrepreneurs
were to take over these reins, then what would be the highway
death toll? To appreciate the difficulty of any such extrapolation,
imagine the scenario wherein wristwatches were always
manufactured by government, and now the private sector was
about to take over. The questions would come thick and fast,
with no obvious answer: how many companies would go into
this business? What would their profits be? Where would they
locate? Would wrist bands be made of leather or metal, and
would these two industries be vertically integrated or not (e.g.,
would one firm manufacture the former, and another the latter,
or would both come under the auspices of only one company)?
What proportion of watches would feature Mickey Mouse, be
waterproof, or feature stopwatches? Would these timepieces be
sold outright, or be given as gifts to people who opened bank
accounts? The reason these questions cannot be answered beforehand
is because they are essentially entrepreneurial issues, not
economic ones. The answers can only emerge in a market, and