The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

340 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
supply. However, I draw the opposite conclusion from White
regarding the implications of all this for highway fatalities. In my
reasoning, people with outré tastes tend to be segregated by market
forces. 19 Rich live with rich, poor with poor, hippies with hippies,
fundamentalists with fundamentalists. Voluntary residential
patterns emerge, too, with regard to race and national origin
and ethnicity, 20 sexual preference, 21 even age. 22 Why should matters
be any different as far as “daredevils and high-speed
freaks” 23 are concerned?
But if this is so, then such denizens would tend to congregate
together with one another. Then, to be blunt about this, they
would then kill each other in a voluntary manner, and stop doing
so to the rest of us. Such roads would constitute a sort of “Murder
Park” 24 on wheels. The private “freak roads” could be offered
chicken races, where two cars race toward each other at breakneck
speeds, and the one who swerves away from the other at the
last minute loses, and is denigrated as “chicken,” a fate worse
than death for these worthies. They could try to establish land
19On market zoning, see Bernard Seigan, Land Use Without Zoning
(Toronto: D.C. Heath).
20Thomas Sowell, Race and Economics (New York: Longman, 1975); idem,
Ethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1981); idem, The Economics and Politics
of Race: An International Perspective (New York: Morrow, 1983); idem,
Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
21Richard Posner, Sex and Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1992).
22Young people congregate in Manhattan, older ones in Florida.
23I assume that there is a large difference between a high-speed freak and
a person who merely wishes for quicker transit time, i.e., that the former
will take other risks that the latter would reject out of hand.
24Murder Park is an imaginary institution where people are given loaded
pistols, and agree to shoot one another. For further explication of this vital
industry, see Walter Block, “Kuflik on Inalienability: A Rejoinder,” unpublished
ms.; idem, “Radical Privatization and other Libertarian Conundrums,”
International Journal of Politics and Ethics 2, no. 2 (2002): 165–75.