The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

336 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
management. It does not seem so implausible to me to suppose
that it might be even higher than the present rate. 9
Let us first focus on attribution. Let us posit the claim that
governments have murdered some 173 million of their own citizens
in the last century, and that, specifically, the partial breakdown
was as follows: Mao, 60 million; Stalin 20 million; Hitler, 11
million; Pol Pot, 2 million. Assume, arguendo, all of these figures10 to be true. Following White’s logic, we would not be able to make
any such attribution. Why? Because all such figures ignore contrary-to-fact
conditionals. To wit, had these governments not
gone on their various murderous rampages, some of these people,
assuredly, would have died in any case. Some would have
perished, merely, of old age. Others would have died from diseases
completely unrelated to statist mismanagement, and therefore
could not be fairly attributed to their socialized medicine
nostrums, for example.
White’s, in other words, is an improper use of the concept of
“attribution.” In my view, there is no need at all to refer to such
contrary-to-fact conditionals. If Hitler, for example, murdered 11
million people, then, by gum and by golly, he killed 11 million
people. The fact that, say, one million of them would have died
in the half decade it took the Nazi regime to accomplish this
slaughter is completely beside the point. They obliterated 11 million,
dagnabit, not 10 million.
9Lawrence H. White, “Comment on Block,” unpub. manuscript, p. 1.
10See on this Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (Edmonton, Alberta:
1990); ibid., The Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986); Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej
Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek and Jean Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism:
Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. from French by Jonathan Murphy
and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); R.J.
Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
1994); ibid., Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Publishers, 1992); ibid., Statistics on Democide (Charlottesville,
Va.: Center on National Security and Law, University of Virginia, 1997).