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The
Road to Freedom
Interview
With Walter Block
Interview With Walter Block
 This
article is excerpted from The
Privatization of Roads and Highways.
Question:
Suppose the state is taken out of the equation; let's presume private
road owners can write and enforce the rules of the road. As it is
in their best interest to ensure safety, the roads will be used
more and therefore become more profitable. Given that this is the
case, do you speculate that road rules will become more strict or
less? Do you think drunk driving, speed limits, and seat belt laws
would be scrapped by these private road owners – and they would
instead institute a contract agreement with each driver stating
that if they cause death, injury, or property damage to other travelers
on these private roads, they must take full responsibility for restitution?
Walter Block:
It is difficult for me to speculate as to how a free market
in roads would actually operate. I'm a theoretical economist, not
the entrepreneur to whom such questions would be better addressed.
However, with that proviso, here are my thoughts. I speculate that
some road owners would have more strict rules, others less strict,
some slightly lenient, and others very lenient. Then, the market
would sort things out. That is, possibly, consumer desires would
impel road entrepreneurs into either a more or less strict stance
– I don't know which. Or, possibly, such diversity would endure.
In some venues (bars, hockey) there are less strict rules; in others
(tea parties, basketball) there are more strict rules. In hockey,
for example, they allow and even encourage the players to fight;
this is strictly banned in basketball. Some road owners might go
one way on this, others, the other way, and the market (the blessed
market, the "magic of the marketplace") would confer greater
profits on those who supply consumers with a better product (rules
of the road in this case) at a lower price. I am trying to apply
economic analysis as it is commonly applied to ordinary issues (bubble
gum, beans, beer) to an area (roads) to which it is unusual to do
so.
Question:
I have heard it argued that privatizing roads will lead to cleaner
air. Drivers having to pay the market price for roads would find
it more costly to drive, prompting a shift to bus, trolley, train,
and car-pooling. I realize this is crystal-ball gazing, but do you
foresee an increase in driver cost, or a decrease? If, as I'm sure
you will suggest, the bottom line decreases making driving more
accessible to all, how will you answer the greens who will condemn
such an assault on planet earth?
Walter Block:
I foresee a decrease in cost in road use compared to now. This is
the ordinary expectation when we privatize things like garbage removal,
postal services. There is even a general "rule of two"
promulgated by Steve Hanke, E.S. Savas, and others: it costs the
public sector roughly twice as much to do anything as the private.
I'd be amazed if roads were an exception.
Air pollution,
with one exception to be mentioned below, is entirely a separate
issue. The reason we have it at all is due to a government failure
to uphold private property rights, in that pollution is merely and
simply an uninvited border crossing, a trespass of dust and other
particles, as it were. So, air pollution could rise, fall or stay
the same as we moved to road privatization. It all depends upon
the state upholding, or failing to uphold, private property rights
in this domain.
Read
the rest of the article
May
22, 2009
Dr.
Block [send him mail] is a
professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans, and a senior
fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of Defending
the Undefendable and Labor
Economics From A Free Market Perspective. His latest book
is The
Privatization of Roads and Highways.
Walter
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