The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Road Privatization: Rejoinder to Mohring 361
there will be a “failure.” But it will be a government failure, not
a market failure. 17
PRICING
Next, Mohring launches into a defense of the case for pricing
of road services. He unfortunately relies upon “a benevolent
highway authority” as the linchpin of his analysis. 18 But if the
Public Choice school 19 of thought has taught us anything, this is
an unlikely scenario at best. He predicates his analysis, too, on
the basis of sufficient information, without asking whether markets
or statist bureaucracies are most likely to generate the requisite
knowledge. Yet, if we have learned anything from the disarray
of the Soviet experiment, it is that central planners cannot
17In Mohring’s treatment of the equilibration between arterial roads and
expressways (p. 146), he speaks of the motorists of each “imposing costs”
(illustrated in his figure 2). This is the same fallacy, under different guise.
There is no more of an “externality” in that case than in the present one
under consideration. Both stem from incomplete privatization of what
could be fully private property in a free society.
18Ibid. 19Charles W. Baird, “James Buchanan and the Austrians: The Common
Ground,” Cato Journal 9, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 1989): 201–30; James D.
Gwartney, Richard E. Wagner, eds., Public Choice and Constitutional Economics
(London: JAI Press, 1988); James M. Buchanan, “Public Choice and Public
Finance,” What Should Economists Do? (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979);
James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical
Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
1971). For a critique of Public Choice, although not on these grounds, see
Walter Block and Thomas J. DiLorenzo, “Is Voluntary Government Possible?
A Critique of Constitutional Economics,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical
Economics 156, no. 4 (December 2001): 567–82; idem, “The Calculus
of Consent Revisited,” Public Finance and Management 1, no. 3 (2001): 37–56;
Murray N. Rothbard, “Public Choice: A Misshapen Tool,” Liberty (1989):
20–21; idem, “Buchanan and Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent,” in The
Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School (Cheltenham,
U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997), pp. 269–74.