The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Who is Responsible for Traffic Deaths? 335
more important and complex provision such as highways to the
always more efficient private sector. To return to our attempts to
calculate the relative efficiency of public and private enterprise, if
there is a two to one rule that operates regarding easy to supply
products and services, then, perhaps, this rule might be amended
to a three to one rule for difficult goods, such as surface transportation.
If so, then, according to our calculations, highway
fatalities would be cut to a third of their present level, and we
would move from 40,000 to 13,334. 8
We can, however, go even further than that in this direction,
far further. Bennett and DiLorenzo (1983) report that, insofar as
weather forecasting is concerned, the private sector costs are only
some 28 percent of what federal government forecasters do. If we
can extrapolate from this (roughly) four to one bit of empirical
evidence in a very different field of endeavor to road fatalities,
deaths can be cut from a horrendous 40,000 to a “mere” 10,000.
But this is not at all the way that White sees matters. He
states:
Block . . . attempts . . . to pin . . . the blame for all highway fatalities
on the government. The argument . . . consists of two
related parts: 1) all highway deaths can be causally attributed to
government management; (2) the government is morally responsible
for these deaths. . . .
Would the highway fatality rate be zero under a system of private
ownership of the roads? There is good economic reason to
suspect not. . . . It is not presently zero in private amusement
parks, or in private road racing, or in private air travel. If we
cannot then attribute all highway deaths to governmental
administration of the highways, how many can we so attribute?
I find it impossible to say, for it is impossible to know a priori
what the death rate would be under private ownership and
8 It will be readily appreciated that these numbers are used for illustration
purposes only, and have no basis in any actual statistics.