The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

414 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
is the antidote to this wrongdoing? Do “we” the current owners
of this land give it back when and where an heir to the original
owners can be found? Can there be parallels drawn between
property stolen from the Russian or Cuban aristocracies in the
communist revolutions with property stolen from Indians in
North America? What’s the difference? These questions are all
relevant to road building, since if the Native Americans really
own virtually all the land, and they do not wish to sell it for
roads, that pretty much ends expanding this form of transportation.
If reparations are paid to them in the form of land, we may
be forced to destroy most of our highways.
WALTER BLOCK: First of all, even if I accept your premise in its
entirety, that the Indians really own most of the territory of the
U.S., it is by no means clear that they would wish all or even most
of the roads to be turned back into farmland or forests or hunting
preserves, or whatever. Surely, most of this acreage is worth far
more in support of highways and streets than for these other purposes.
If the Natives own it, why would they want to suffer the
vast economic losses entailed in such conversions? Because farms
and woodlands are more consistent with their “culture”?
Unlikely in the extreme. They now preside over a plethora of
western, oriented, gambling establishments, due to loopholes in
the law, and it is difficult to argue that these are part of their traditions.
No, profit maximization is no monopoly of white, blacks
or orientals.
Second, it is by no means clear that the Indians are the rightful
owners of anything like the entire U.S. Under libertarian law,
they could justly claim only those parts of the land that they
homesteaded, or occupied, not hunted over. They owned those
paths that they used to get from their winter to their summer
places. This is based on the Lockean-Rothbardian-Hoppean
homesteading theory. I estimate that they owned, in this way, at
most 1 percent of the land in the US. 3
3 See on this several articles I wrote on the topic: Walter Block, “On
Reparations to Blacks for Slavery,” Human Rights Review 3, no. 4