15. Comment on Roads, Bridges, Sunlight and Private Property (Comment by Gordon Tullock)

The paper by the two Blocks¹ refers several times to my position. I believe its origin was a brief conversation I had with the two of them several years ago. I have to admit that I do not remember exactly what was said, but I do know what my position on private roads is, and think I can defend myself without much difficulty.

There are several items here, one of which is the adoption by way of Rothbard of the “homestead” view of land title held by Locke. In this view, you obtain title to land by occupying land that no one else now owns and mixing your labor with it. The problem with this in the present day world is there is practically no such land available, hence you have to buy.

If you look back at the chain of title of almost any existing piece of land, you will find that some time in the past there was a forcible disposition of a previous owner, and you are buying the title which descends from that forcible disposition. This is particularly obvious in the case of the United States. It should be pointed out that, in general, the Indian tribes that we displaced had a few generations earlier displaced other Indian tribes.

Locke, the actual originator of the argument that you get title by mixing your labor with unowned land wrote the constitution for the colony of South Carolina, which displaced a number of Indians. It was also a slave colony, although apparently Locke didn’t approve of that.

But to return to the road problem, perhaps it is easiest to understand if we consider the situation when the railroads were introduced. They would all be built on a long thin piece of land, hence, the railroad charters usually had restrictions on the full title to it. The state governments took over the previous rules for canal and railroads. Basically, there was a general permission for anybody to build another railroad across an existing railroad, normally by condemning a right of way sometimes as a sort of price on the permission to build the railroad. Of course, roads and canals have the same privileges.

The extension of this rule to other forms of transportation including pedestrian traffic is obvious. When pipelines and then later electric, high-tension lines came in, they were also given the same privileges. Ultimately, a new and improved technology for moving coal, slurry pipelines, was invented which wasn’t mentioned in existing legislation. The proponents went to Congress to see if they could get the current laws amended. There then followed a vast battle of lobbyists which, unfortunately, the railroads won so that we have no slurry pipelines. No one seems to have tried building a very high bridge or drilling a tunnel under existing railroads, although most pipelines are built underground.

The Blocks’ position is one which I run into occasionally from what I call the real, private ownership enthusiasts. They just don’t let the government have any power. The Blocks are like the rest of them in that, for some obscure reason, they think that the courts are not part of the government. They have the courts making the decisions of how far up or how far down ownership extends. Why the court is more qualified than the legislature is not obvious. Both frequently make bad errors.

So much for this important but easy problem, the fact that if you had private and total ownership of roads, it would be possible to purchase all the houses around a given plot of land, let us say the roughly one square mile upon which my house and several hundred other houses stand. Then by charging for crossing your property you could collect the full rental value of the enclosed land.

Incidentally, the Blocks seem to think that I believe that owners of the roads would prohibit people from crossing rather than charge them a toll. Since I have admitted that I do not remember the conversation in detail, it is possible that I said something which could be so interpreted. If so I regret it.

Let me now turn to another problem with respect to private roads which I think is equally important but harder to solve. I do not know a solution, but I have no proof that none exists. I normally challenge proponents of private roads to draw a road map in which competitive roads are shown. This is quite feasible with superhighways. Indeed, at the moment some people are building such private roads in the United States. With these roads it may well be that economies of scale will make competition impossible, but there is no way of telling until we have some more experimentation. For superhighways we can’t say that private ownership is not feasible until we have at least ten years of experience.

On the minor roads the matter is different. To repeat, I have not proved that you cannot have competing road nets, but none of the people who are in favor of it have ever met my challenge to produce a set of competing road nets on a map. I would not like the only road from my house to be owned by a monopolistic income maximizer.

Note the road could be, as in fact the road to my house is, owned by a private association which works exactly like a village. I discussed this at some length in my The New Federalist.²

Although the Sunshine Mountain Ridge Homeowners Association, in which I live, was set up by a private real estate firm, it behaves just like a government. There are many similar cases in the United States. This is actually collective ownership rather than an individual ownership, and functions by holding elections among the individual owners.

In general, with respect to privately owned roads, first we cannot give them full title, and the Blocks don’t as they introduce their own idea of titles. This is an important problem but one that is easy to deal with. We just compel owners of roads to permit people to cross them.

The other problem which I think is harder but which I am not sure is impossible is generating a competitive system of roads. I take it not even the Blocks would favor a monopoly owning all of the roads in the near vicinity of their homes. In essence, they would be converted into renters or their landlord would be.

I am very much interested in experimentation in this area, and in particular the devices available now under which people can be charged for the use of the roads in terms of how much and when they use them. But the roads should be collective entities unless my problem given above of designing a competing road network is solved.

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*This chapter first appeared as Gordon Tullock, “Comment on ‘Roads, Bridges, Sunlight and Private Property,’ by Walter Block and Matthew Block,” Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines 7, no. 4 (December 1996): 589–92.

¹Walter Block and Matthew Block, “Roads, Bridges, Sunlight and Private Property Rights,” Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines 7, no. 2/3 (June–September 1996): 351–62.

²Gordon Tullock, The New Federalist (Vancouver, B.C.: Fraser Institute, 1994), esp. pp. 9–16.