Privatize the Airports!
February 1999
by Lawrence W. Reed
"There is nothing in the stars that ordains airports to be owned and managed by
governments. Both economic theory and recent experience demonstrate that. The sooner
airports are run by private enterprise, the better."
Privatizing Airline Safety and Security
November 2002
by Paul A. Cleveland and Thomas L. Tacker
"The financial risks involved provide the insurance companies incentives to regulate
the airlines effectively and efficiently without imposing costly rules that serve
little or no purpose. Competition and entrepreneurship would then shape the evolutionary
development of air safety and security, rather than politics and monopoly bureaucracy.
The fallacies in the command-and-control approach show why private security should be
adopted."
"An airline's track record is crucial in gaining the confidence of customers and
securing insurance against liability. The benefit of privatization is that any
advancement that can improve safety per dollar spent will be adopted by other air
carriers quickly. Under government control, such changes are likely to take ages to
bring about."
Privatizing Air Security
December 6, 2010
by Robert P. Murphy
Insurance actuaries — supplemented by experts in terrorism, of course — are the
ideal profession to evaluate the benefits of various security procedures. Right now,
an actuary can calculate the premium on, say, a $1 million life-insurance policy
for a smoker of a certain age and other characteristics. The actuary can also
calculate how much the premium could be lowered if the potential customer decided
to quit smoking. In principle, an actuary could tell an airline the expected amount
of damages (resulting from a terrorist incident) that would be avoided per passenger
if some new security screening measure is implemented."
The State and Electrical Distribution
by F. W. Beauchamp Gordon
"The Electric Lighting Acts exist, however, and a precedent threatening to the old form
of enterprise generally has been established. It is conceded, of course, that by
Parliament this business of supplying light was looked upon as a special one, calling for
exceptional treatment. But such special precedents are apt to develop into general
ones; and having seen how far the legislature has already gone in fettering individual
effort to encourage the supply 'by the people for the people' of one particular article
(which after all is not so great a necessity as bread, and no greater a necessity, at any
rate, than boots), we may pretty confidently hope, or dread, according to our views upon
such matters, for an almost indefinite extension in the same direction. Municipal
bakehouses, municipal boot factories, every form of industrial operation developed into
everybody's business in general and nobody's in particular—to what Utopian prosperity and
happiness may we not yet attain!"
Seeds of Hope: Agricultural Technologies and Poverty Alleviation in Rural South Africa
September 8, 2006
by Karol Boudreaux
"Land tenure insecurity, high banking costs, and rigid labor laws continue to plague
the farmers. However by creating and selling the Combi-Pack, Monsanto is doing something
that critics of globalization might find surprising: a multinational company is helping
to drive away hunger and better the lives of the rural poor."
We Didn’t Stop the Fire
October 6, 2010
by Roderick Long
"A recent spectacular example of government failure – namely, a government fire company’s refusing
to put out a nonpayer’s fire– has been transformed, through the magic of non sequitur, into a criticism
of libertarianism. That last charge is too silly to comment on, but the case does raise some
interesting libertarian issues."
A radical proposal to bail out Smokey: privatization
May 25, 1993
by John A. Baden, Ph.D. and Tim O’Brien
"Instead of continuing the failed, special-interest-dominated political management of
old growth in national forests, consider what would happen if we gave the old growth
to various environmental groups, e.g., the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society. This
radical proposal would remove the forests from governmental politics and present the
new land managers with strong incentives to preserve the values of old growth at the
lowest possible cost."
A way to encourage environmental entrepreneurship
February 16, 1993
by John A. Baden, Ph.D. and Robert Ethier
"Entrepreneurship exists in the nonprofit as well as the for-profit world, The Nature
Conservancy and the North American Elk Foundation are highly successful examples. These
organizations creatively respond to new interests and understandings. A Shoshone
Biodiversity Trust can follow their lead. With such trusts we can better preserve
shared values, allowing each forest to fulfill its mission and maintain its ecological
endowment."
Libertarian Vacationers Demand Their Subsidies
by Gary North
"Over the last four decades, I have found all too often that libertarian defenders of
the free market are tried and true men of principle until the day that someone points
out that their favorite subsidy from the government is a form of theft. Then they call
the critic a crank."
The National Parks: The Super-Rich's Greatest Idea
September 28, 2009
by Gary North
"My view is that the Federal government should auction off the national parks and use
the money to reduce taxes. Soft-core conservatives think this money should be used to
reduce the national debt. That is the equivalent of putting a 17-year-old female page
on the staff of a Congressman. It only tempts them."
Park Lovers Can Save National Parks
July 10, 1996
by John A. Baden, Ph.D. and Douglas S. Noonan
"National parks are failing to deliver the quality or stability park-lovers demand.
Support and management of our national heritage must come from the people who appreciate
and benefit from those parks. When parks must pay their own way through fees and
friends, we'll see more responsible stewardship. The parks are too precious for a
precarious dependency on politics."
Volunteer Railways in Britain
January 2008
by James L. Payne
". . . when political means failed, local activists and philanthropists stepped in
to buy and operate the railroads themselves. They formed nonprofit organizations,
or “charities” as the British call them, to preserve a distinctive part of their
local history."
Adopt a Highway: The Case for Privatizing Our Roads
November 23, 2007
by John Semmens
"Under the government system, priorities (like maintenance) are distorted and financing
is politicized."
All roads do not lead to congestion
October 7, 2003
by Jim Peron
"The overuse of roads, or congestion, is what we expect when markets are not allowed
to operate. We can't rationally look at alternatives because important price information
is hidden from us. Only by the use of market signals will we get feedback that allows
us to make rational choices between the alternatives."
Congestion and Road Pricing
by Walter Block
Free Market Transportation: Denationalizing the Roads
by Walter Block
Government Highways: Unsafe at Any Speed
June 1993
by Richard Barbarick
"One can hope that the trend toward privatization will reach U.S. roadways and lead
to safer and more efficient roads. Roadway slaughter can and must end. Our roadkeepers
expose us to senseless risk of injury and death, and we often have to wait in line for
the privilege."
Government's killer roads
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"Consider that more than 40,000 people are massacred every year on government-owned
and operated roads. Road travel (not smoking or drugs) is the leading cause of death
of young people age six to 28."
Homesteading City Streets: An Exercise In Managerial Theory
by Walter Block
"Privatizing all goods and services will satisfy consumers far more effectively than
allowing their management to remain in the hands of the state, under socialist
provision. If we have learned one thing from the fall of the economic system of
the U.S.S.R., it is that. More controversially, city streets are no exception to this
general rule. They, too, can be mismanaged by the municipal government, or run
more efficiently though the institutions of private property and competition."
Liberate the Roads! The Benefits That Will Come From Road Privatisation
by Martin Ball
The Mythology of Holdout as Justification for Eminent Domain and Public Provision of Roads
by Bruce L. Benson
"According to the conventional wisdom, road transportation would be highly inefficient
without the government’s power of eminent domain, because property owners could refuse
to sell their property at the government’s asking price. In reality, there are strong
grounds for thinking that private, for-profit road companies would have fewer problems
with holdouts and few problems as severe as that of government failure in road
transportation."
No More Government Roads
by David M. Woods
Argues that tax-financed roads are an expensive subsidy to the auto industry
that distorts the market for transportation.
A Note About Roads
by Richard O. Hammer
Observations on the history of roads.
Overcoming difficulties in privatizing roads
by Walter Block
"The present article considers, and rejects, four arguments against the privatization
of roads, and in favor of our present system of road socialism."
A Practical Proposal for Privatizing the Highways (and Other Natural Monopolies)
by Bryan Caplan
This proposal involves giving every adult citizen (1) a common stock
certificate that entitles him to a share of the privatized road
corporation's profits and (2) another certificate that allows the
individual to operate one motor vehicle on the highways in exchange
for an annual fee.
Private Highways
by stormy MON
Part of an online book, Imagine Freedom, which attacks government
and religion.
Private highways: a solution whose time has come (again)?
by Daniel Klein
"Private ownership of 'public' resources may be an idea whose time
has come. There are proposals for the privatization of Grand
Coulee Dam, Dulles airport, Conrail, and Amtrak. State and local
governments are studying private urban transit, garbage
collection, and prisons. If privatization maintains its momentum,
we will have to consider a logical candidate: the roads."
The Private Ownership of Public Space: The New Age of Rationally Priced Road Use
by Brian Micklethwait
Privatization Further Down the Road
June 1986
by Daniel B. Klein
"Private roads may sound far-fetched, but a familiarity with American history casts
the idea in a different light, There was a period when private enterprise was able
to provide such “public goods.” Private turnpikes engendered important social benefits
even though returns on investment were small, primarily due to legal restrictions on
toll rates and on the placement of toll houses."
Privatize the Highways — and All Roads for That Matter
August 3, 2011
by Zachary Slayback
"The call for highway privatization may seem radical, but it is not. Several
major highways across the United States are privately owned, including the
Chicago Skyway and the Dulles Greenway."
Protecting the Streets
by Murray Rothbard
"What we need to do is to reorient our thinking to consider a world in which all
land areas are privately owned."
Protection from Mass Murderers: Communication of Danger: A Formulation
by Richard O. Hammer
A nation in which individuals make the rules of conduct on their own
property and where most property, including roads, is privately owned,
would evolve into a social network that is better able to control
psychopaths than the present system.
The Recovery of Stolen Roads
June 17, 2010
by Jim Davies
"One fun thing about freedom is that it will find the best way to arrange things, and
quickly; but because that will often involve invention at the time, we cannot readily
predict that solution. One possibility would be that each customer pays an annual access
fee to his local road owner (where he gains access from his driveway) and then gets billed
monthly for usage nationwide – quite comparable to the system used by land-line phone
companies."
Roads and Money
Why government control isn't necessary.
June 29, 2010
by James Leroy Wilson
"But the State doesn't need to build roads, and the State doesn't need to create money.
Voluntary cooperation can produce both."
Roads Are Too Important to be Left to Governments
by Gabriel Roth
"Toll roads were privately supplied two hundred years ago on a large scale in both
the U.S. and the UK. Their private provision today is even more practical because
modern technology enables customers to pay for road use without tollbooths, and even
without vehicles having to stop."
Road Socialism
by Walter Block
The Road to Freedom: An Interview with Walter Block
by Walter Block
"My new book, to be published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, will be on road
privatization. It will be based on my extant publications on this subject, plus lots
of new material not previously published."
Roads to Serfdom
by Jim Davies
"Notice however, please: I'm not calling for government to be eliminated just
from the management of roads. I'm calling for government to be eliminated, even
from management of the roads. Nothing less will do."
Roads Without the State
January 1998
by Peter Samuel
"It is possible to bring some of the benefits of the marketplace by introducing tolls
while maintaining state ownership. That is what the Germans plan for their autobahn
system, and it seems to be the major British approach. But full privatization would
transfer ownership to investors and allow the assets to be traded, introducing the
additional market discipline of competition in both consumer and capital markets. By
allowing takeovers, consolidations, and spin-offs of highway assets, the markets would
ensure that highways are managed for the best return on capital—the dynamic that gives
us our food, our fuels, our housing, our electric power, and all the rest of what goes
into our standard of living."
Road Warrior
by Robert W. Poole, Jr.
A review of Roads in a Market Economy by Gabriel Roth.
"This is an important and thought-provoking book. It is
bizarre that Americans have so uncritically accepted a central-planning model for our
transportation infrastructure, while developing the world's best telecommunication
infrastructure using a (largely) free market model. Indeed, one of the unexpected delights
of this book is a heretofore unpublished essay, included as an epilogue, by Milton
Friedman and Daniel Boorstin, dating from the early 1950s, proposing both private
ownership and market pricing for roads. As usual, Friedman was way ahead of most of the
rest of us. Fortunately, with the publication of Gabriel Roth's book, these ideas will gain
the kind of hearing they have long deserved."
Snow Jobs
by Fred S. McChesney
"Observing how parking spaces are allocated in Chicago provides a fundamental lesson in
property rights economics."
Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads
edited by Gabriel Roth
"Street Smart examines private, market-based alternatives for road services, both in
theory and practice. The book explores at least four such possible directions for
private services, including testing and licensing vehicles and drivers; management of
government-owned road facilities; franchising; and outright private ownership.
The book further traces the history of private roads in Great Britain and the United
States and examines contemporary examples of entrepreneurial innovation in road
pricing, privatization, and marketization in environs as diverse as Singapore,
California, Ghana, Norway, and England."
Street Smart:
Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads
edited by Gabriel Roth
A synopsis of the book. "An interdisciplinary approach to road reform, Street Smart
draws on subjects as diverse as economics and public-policy analysis, engineering and
technology, the history of private roads, and case studies of recent market-based reforms
in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Sweden, Singapore, and elsewhere."
Toll Roads to the Rescue
October 24, 2007
by Gabriel Roth
"Road pricing is not rocket science. Thanks to recent advances in technology, road users
can be charged electronically without having to stop their vehicles, and charges can be
varied from place to place and time to time as traffic conditions change. This has been
done since 1995 on a 10-mile stretch of express toll lanes built in the median of
91 Freeway where the charges are set to ensure free flow at all times and vary from
$1.20 at night to $9.50 at the busiest times."
Trails and the Free-Rider Problem
June 18, 2003
by Pete Geddes
"The Gallatin Valley Land Trust (GVLT) works to build and maintain our popular “Main
Street to the Mountains” trail system. The trails weave through neighborhoods and along
scenic ridgelines. One day they’ll be fully connected, providing easy access to the
public lands surrounding town. While the benefits rebound to many, the costs are borne
by a few; primarily GVLT members. Since there is no user fee and it is impractical
to “police” the trails, many of us are free riding. What can we do? Three solutions
come to mind."
What price parking?
December 18, 2006
Boston Globe
"A fledgling service that would let people find and reserve parking spaces via their
cellphones could make life easier for those who use it."
What Race Tracks Can Teach Us About Government Roads
May 28, 2012
by Eric Peters
"If roads were not government-owned all the abuses currently perpetrated by the
state upon harming-no-one motorists would disappear."
Social Security Privatization: A Personal View
July 2002
by Roger M. Clites
"When I retired in 1991 I elected to withdraw only interest from my TIAA-CREF account
and leave the principal untouched until I was required by law to begin drawing it down.
(That occurred a few years ago.) That interest, on just 22 years of investments, was
greater than my Social Security check, which was based on a lifetime of work. The
investments in private businesses paid off far better than the taxes taken for Social
Security."
A New Space Policy: Free Enterprise
October 1987
by J. Brian Phillips
"America’s “space eggs” have all been placed in one basket—NASA—and the consequences
are painfully clear. It is time for a space policy which eliminates this government
monopoly and allows America’s entrepreneurs the freedom they need to reach for
the stars."
Virgin Galactic Unveils First Tourist Spaceship
December 10, 2009
by Ker Than
"After years of teases, the world's only commercial spacecraft rolled out onto the
tarmac at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California."
Private Cures for Public Ills: The Promise of Privatization edited by Lawrence
W. Reed
reviewed by E. S. Savas
April 1996
"My own definition of privatization is reflected throughout the book: privatization
means relying more on the private institutions of society—the market, voluntary groups,
and the family—and less on government to satisfy people's needs."
Privatizing Federal Programs
June 1987
by Hans F. Sennholz
"The only privatization worthy of its name is the sale of government assets at market
prices to individuals who acquire clear and unhampered title to the property."
WPC on contracting out and privatization
A collection of policy briefs and press releases devoted to
explaining how functions can be better performed in the private
sector, and how other functions can be achieved in a more costly
fashion by contracting them out to private providers.