The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

380 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
of people in the U.S. alone. 3 This being the case, and combining
that insight with libertarian theories of punishment, it is clear
that the guilty parties would be made to pay for their crimes 4 in
a fully libertarian society. The Nuremberg trials would be the
model followed in such proceedings. As in the case of the Nazis, 5
there would be no statute of limitations on murder. 6 Nor would
we shrink from ex post facto jurisprudence. Libertarian law is
timeless. Unjustified killing is just as much a violation of proper
jurisprudence for modern man as it was for the ancient caveman,
and as it will be for the future spaceman. The sooner this message
3It is one of the errors of Rummel who calculates the number of people
killed by their own governments, that he does not include roadway fatalities.
R.J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction,
1996) calculates the total number of noncombatants killed by their own
governments during twentieth century as 169,198,000. But, he neglects to
include the deaths on the nation’s highways attributable to government
operation.
4Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.:
Humanities Press, 1982), pp. 54, 85–96; Stephan Kinsella, “Estoppel: A New
Justification for Individual Rights,” Reason Papers 17 (Fall): 61; idem, “Punishment
and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach,” Journal of Libertarian
Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring, 1996); idem, “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian
Rights Theory,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall, 1996):
313–26; idem, “A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights,” 30 Loyola
Los Angeles Law Review (1997): 607–45.
5It is more than passing curious that mass-murdering Communists are
treated differently than mass-murdering Nazis. Although this can only be
speculative, this is perhaps due to the fact that the former were allied with
the victors in World War II and not the other way around.
6Is it too harsh to claim that those responsible for road deaths are guilty
of murder? Surely, there was no intent to kill such victims. Perhaps
manslaughter is the more accurate characterization, since it would appear
that the authorities are guilty of no more than “reckless disregard” for the
lives of others. For the criminal code of Louisiana, see www.legis.state.la.us/
tsrs/search.htm. See the appendix for definitions of manslaughter and negligent
homicide, and then you decide, gentle reader, into which category
our road and highway managers fall.