The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Who is Responsible for Traffic Deaths? 337
But we do not need to resort to mass murderers of a gargantuan
scale to make the point that White misconstrues what it is to
“attribute” responsibility for an act to someone. It applies to
moderate mass murderers as well. Janet Reno took responsibility
for the unjustified killing of some 86 innocents including women
and children at Waco, 11 as did Tim McVeigh for 168 people, also
including women and children, at the Murrah Federal Building
in Oklahoma City. 12 Perhaps—likely, even—some of these would
have otherwise died of natural causes, had these nefarious deeds
not taken place. Yet, we still “attribute” all 86 to Reno, and all 168
to McVeigh, this alternative possibility notwithstanding. Hence,
there is no need at all to determine the contrary-to-fact conditional
of how many people would have perished on the nation’s
roads were they privatized, and to subtract this number from the
40,000 or so who are butchered under governmental management.
The highway fatality rate need not at all be zero under a system
of private ownership to entitle us to attribute to government
all the fatalities currently occurring under public sector auspices.
Very much to the contrary, just as we attribute to murderers all
the deaths they cause, we must do the very same thing for governmental
road managers.
Let us now consider the analysis presented above at the outset
of this chapter. According to it, if road deaths are 40,000 under
the aegis of the state, and would have been 15,000 with markets
providing roads, then we attribute only 40,000 – 15,000 = 25,000
fatalities to the present management. Nonsense. We hold these
bureaucrats responsible for the entire amount of misery they
have caused.
However, it cannot be denied that it is an interesting, nay, a
fascinating question, to ask how the number of highway deaths
11http://www.Firearmsandliberty.com/waco.massacre.html. 12Strange why one of these two has been executed, and the other, not.