The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

362 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
rely on anything like accurate assessments of economic reality. 20
In contrast, entrepreneurs sink or swim on the quality of the
information they can generate. The market, weeding-out process
ensures that those with better knowledge, ceteris paribus, will continually
out perform and eventually bankrupt those with inferior
data, thus tending to continually improve matters in this regard.
Needless to say, this is a phenomenon lacking in governmental
operation.
There is no question but that governmental pricing of highway
services would be more efficient than its present policy of
not charging at all. Certainly, pricing would do wonders in terms
of alleviating traffic congestion. However, for the advocate of
road privatization, this constitutes something of a vexing issue.
Given that governmental ownership is an unmitigated evil, is it
a step in the right direction, or in the wrong one, to render this
evil more efficient, through pricing, in this case? Certainly, no
advocate of the freedom philosophy could advocate a more efficiently
run, Nazi concentration camp, e.g., one which would kill
more innocent people per dollar spent. True, government managed
roads are scarcely equivalent to a concentration camp. On
the other hand, statist roads do constitute rather more than just a
bit of a charnel house. Given that some 40,000 people perish on
our nation’s highways each year, how much of this is attributable
to government ownership? This is very difficult to discern.
20 Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (Indianapolis, Ind.: LibertyPress/Liberty/Classics,
1981); Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism:
Economics, Politics and Ethics (Boston: Dordrecht, 1989); Peter J. Boettke,
Why Perestroika Failed: The Politics and Economics of Socialist
Transformation (New York: Routledge, 1993); Hans-Hermann Hoppe,
“Socialism: A Property or Knowledge Problem?” Review of Austrian Economics
9, no. 1 (1996): 147–54.