Public Goods Proposals (Roads, Rivers, etc.)

Congestion and Road Pricing
by Walter Block
This is a PDF file. You need Adobe Acrobat(TM) or an equivalent program to handle PDF files.

Free Market Transportation: Denationalizing the Roads
by Walter Block
This is a PDF file. You need Adobe Acrobat(TM) or an equivalent program to handle PDF files.

Liberate the Roads! The Benefits That Will Come from Road Privatisation
by Martin Ball
Describes the benefits of road privatization to the user and to the environment.

Libertarian solutions: 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."

A Note About Roads
by Richard O. Hammer
Observations on the history of roads.

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: A solution whose time has come (again)?
by Daniel Klein
Private roads worked in the past and they can work again.

Private Highways
by stormy MON
Part of an online book, Imagine Freedom, which attacks government and religion.

The Private Ownership of Public Space: The New Age of Rationally Priced Road Use
by Brian Micklethwait
Describes the economic benefits of private roads.

Private Roads, Competition, Automobile Insurance and Price Controls
by Walter Block
Shows that the benefits of competition for improving roadways cannot take place unless the roadways are privatized.

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.

Should Government Build the Railroads?
by Burton Folsom, Jr.
The people of Michigan learned through bitter experience that the state should not be a party to any works of internal improvement such as canals and railroads. So they re-wrote their constitution to outlaw such activity by the state, and they sold the railroads to private entrepreneurs.

Solving America's spectrum crisis
by Adam D. Thierer
"Property rights, private contracts, and the common law govern disputes over tangible property in America. It's time to apply this same time-tested logic to the electromagnetic spectrum."

Theories of Highway Safety
by Walter Block
Explains why privately owned highways would be safer.

Water Markets
by National Center for Policy Analysis
Summary of a study done by Terry Anderson and Pamela Snyder in which they argue for market pricing of water resources.

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This page was last updated on March 7, 2004.