The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Who is Responsible for Traffic Deaths? 339
with regard to price were positive, this could be a profitable
entrepreneurial decision. That is, people would pay sufficiently
more for being able to go fast to more than offset the road owner
for loss of additional consumers.
So “speed” is really not the answer. We can have quicker
transportation, 15 and greater safety, both. White16 takes me to
task for my insufficient defense of “daredevils and high-speed
freaks . . . who prefer to travel deadlier highways.” It cannot be
doubted that there are some such people. Who has not seen wildeyed
young kids drag racing on our city streets amidst normal
traffic? Perhaps the best example of this barbarous behavior is
Rodney King, arrested for speeding at near one hundred miles
per hour through city streets. 17 In White’s interpretation, private
enterprise would cater to such individuals, instead of outlawing
them as at present, and thus deaths would rise as we moved from
public to private provision.
Nonsense on stilts. I have no doubt that the marketplace
would accommodate such tastes. It does so for a plethora of
weird desires; 18 why not this one too? Where there is money to
be made, there will be an entrepreneur arising to provide the
15Do you ever strictly adhere to statist speed limits? If you do, you’ll find
that you are by far the slowest vehicle on the roadway. Do 50 in a 50 mph
zone and people will give you the finger for clogging up traffic; ditto for 60
and 70 mph. Why do the road socialists perpetrate this policy on us? For
one thing, if they inculcate rules that everyone breaks, there will always be
a “criminal” to fine. For another, and more ominously, it may well be part
of the phenomenon against which Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted
Minority: Big Business,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. (New York:
Signet, 1967), warned us. By converting all of us into lawbreakers, the government
can rely upon our guilt to better rule us.
16White, “Comment on Block,” pp. 2–3.
17For an analysis of this episode, see Walter Block, “Decentralization,
Subsidiarity, Rodney King and State Deification,” European Journal of Law
and Economics 16, no. 2 (November): 139–47.
18 Sado-masochism, child pornography, fetishes that beggar description.