The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

416 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
actions you believe to be effective, and get some advice for libertarians
(and other liberty lovers) to take in order to live more
freely. After all, roads will not be privatized unless the climate for
freedom is far greater than at present.
WALTER BLOCK: When I started in the libertarian movement,
in around 1963 or so, there were probably, literally, one hundred
libertarians in the entire world. Now, using that word, libertarian,
in the same way as earlier, there must be tens of thousands
of us if not hundreds of thousands. We have made great strides.
In the early days, if I didn’t know the person as a libertarian, they
probably weren’t one. Now, there are entire libertarian organizations,
let alone individuals, of which I’m entirely unaware. 4
I think the prospects for increasing our numbers is great.
Maybe not for increasing them proportionately, since it is easier
to grow in percentage times when you have virtually zero. If we
doubled our size once a year in the early days, we might still be
able to do so once every few years, nowadays.
But, we face obstacles. Two of the greatest exponents of the
philosophy, who stand head and shoulders over everyone else in
terms of the numbers of people they’ve converted to the one, true
faith, have recently passed away (Murray Rothbard and Ayn
Rand). This will make our task far more difficult.
QUESTION: How should we proceed? In the same old ways:
writing, lecturing, teaching at university, promoting the Libertarian
Party. 5 I don’t think we have any comparative advantage in
rabble rousing, or in picking up the gun.
WALTER BLOCK: My natural inclination is to refuse to answer
this question (I know, I know, I have already started to answer it;
don’t ask). My reason for this “refusal” is that the prospects for
liberty have nothing to do with my own commitment to the
4See on this www.policyexperts.org/organizations/organizations.cfm. I
should mention perhaps my own favorite libertarian-promoting organization:
the Mises Institute, www.mises.org.
5www.lp.org.