From: CJ
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2016 10:16 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Open Letter to the President-elect
Dr. Block: This is the best chance we have at wrestling some key aspects of the economy from government meddling. The attached document is the text of an open letter concerning transportation. I’m approaching you first because you have probably given this subject more serious thought than anyone else. I hope you will be a signatory and I also hope you will encourage as many of your peers as possible to do the same. CJ
President- elect Trump:
At the same times of day, every single day, for the past 40 years, in the most successful nation the world has ever known, millions of consumers waste millions of hours sitting at the same traffic bottlenecks.
The question for you is not why – we know exactly why. The question for you is who can fix it – fast. Whose interests align with those of the American consumer? Who wants the American consumer to have cost and event free roadways to travel?
Our great retailers, energy producers, REITS, pension funds, lenders as well as everyone else who benefits from economic activity, collectively have the means and more importantly, have the economic interest in freeing the American consumer from the daily gridlock on our roads.
You can only do so much at the Federal level, this idea will require states relinquish their decades long chokehold on American transportation construction. But you have captured a nation’s imagination and you can explain to the public how all our interests are best served by freeing transportation from politics.
President-elect Trump, let the people who rely on drivers driving serve their self-interest and let’s save a trillion dollars while we’re at it.
Dear CJ: I agree with you, enthusiastically, that rush hour bumper to bumper traffic is very wasteful and unproductive. The solution I give in this book of mine
Block, Walter E. 2009. The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors; Auburn, AL: The Mises Institute; http://www.amazon.com/Privatization-Roads-And-Highways-Factors/dp/1279887303/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336605800&sr=1-1; available for free here: http://mises.org/books/roads_web.pdf; http://mises.org/daily/3416; http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/radical_privatization.pdf; audio: http://store.mises.org/Privatization-of-Roads-and-Highways-Audiobook-P11005.aspx; http://www.audible.com/pd/Business/The-Privatization-of-Roads-and-Highways-Audiobook/B0167IT18K?tag=misesinsti-20; http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=bf16b152ccc444bdbbcc229e4&id=6cbc90577b&e=54244ea97d
is privatization. All streets, roads and highways should be place in private hands. There should be a separation of road and state of the order of church and state. Then, I would expect private firms would engage in peak load pricing which would in one fell swoop cure this problem. But, your open letter mentions “transportation construction” which will not solve the problem. Only peak load pricing would do so, without adding even one more mile of highways to our national repertoire. Even if your petition mentioned that initiative, I still wouldn’t sign it, since that would put me in the position of being an efficiency expert for the state (sort of like Robert Poole, of the Reason Foundation), and this I would be very loathe to do, not even for Donald Trump, who I supported in the past election, vis a vis Hillary. If you would write another petition calling for privatization on grounds of curing rush hour traffic, and thus increasing productivity, I would be inclined to sign and support it.
2:34 pm on December 7, 2016
