The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

394 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
has done yeoman work in underscoring the fact that the state, but
not the marketplace, tends always to operate in the dark. The
central planners simply have no way of amalgamating, gathering,
mobilizing and utilizing the scattered and subjective knowledge
of specific time and place possessed by numerous market
participants; in contrast, the price system is a marvelous mechanism
for accomplishing precisely these tasks.
More radically, Mises stresses appraisement: if there are no
entrepreneurs out there estimating the values of goods, then
socialist enterprises of the sort now under discussion simply cannot
rationally plan. But with governments in charge of roadways,
and with private enterprise relegated to the secondary position of
subcontracting, then the process of accurate price generation is to
that extent compromised. 32
TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT?
“Should New Toll Lanes Have Temporary or Permanent
Tolls?” asks Poole, and he answers as follows:
32 For more on the latter type of analysis, see Walter Block and Kenneth M.
Garschina, “Hayek, Business Cycles and Fractional Reserve Banking: Continuing
the De-Homogenization Process,” Review of Austrian Economics 9, no.
1 (1995): 77–94; Richard Ebeling, “Introduction,” in Ebeling, ed., The Global
Failure of Socialism (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 1992); Jeffrey M.
Herbener, “Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School of Economics,”
Review of Austrian Economics 5, no. 2 (1991): 33–50; Murray N. Rothbard, “The
End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited,” Review of Austrian
Economics 5, no. 2 (1991): 51–76. Reprinted in The Logic of Action One: Method,
Money, and the Austrian School (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing,
1997), pp. 408–37; idem, “The Present State of Austrian Economics,” working
paper from the Ludwig von Mises Institute (November 1992), reprinted in
The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School (Cheltenham,
U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997), pp. 111–72, reprinted in Journal des
Economistes et des Etudes Humaines 6, no. 1 (March 1995): 43–89; idem, “Mises
and Hayek Dehomogenized,” Review of Austrian Economics 6, no. 2 (1992):
113–46; idem, “A Final Word: Calculation, Knowledge and Appraisement,”
Review of Austrian Economics 9, no. 1 (1995): 141–42; Odd Stalebrink, “The
Hayek and Mises Controversy: Bridging Differences,” Quarterly Journal of
Austrian Economics 7, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 27–38.