The Progress of Liberty

I offer the thirty-first part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “In part 26 [Mr. Stolyarov] writes: ‘So my argument stands that the total cost of private roads to most users will be much less than the total cost of government roads to most users today.’ Perhaps so.  However, his argument in Part 21 was this: ‘While tolls for private roads may be higher in some cases than tolls for government roads under the current system, I disagree with the statement that they would be much higher under a private system.’ This is about tolls only, whereas his claim above is about all costs, including those paid via taxes and licenses. This is not standing by the argument, but radically changing it.”

I think that my position is consistent, and this is why.

In Part 21, I said that tolls for some individual private roads might be higher in some cases than tolls for some individual government roads today, but no individual private road (of comparable or slightly better quality than government roads today) will have tolls that are much higher than tolls on government-controlled toll roads today.

However, since many more private roads than government roads would be funded by tolls, it is still quite possible and likely that the aggregate private tolls would exceed the aggregate government tolls, which was Mr. Jetton’s point, and which I said it was possible to comfortably concede in Part 26. But I never said that aggregate private tolls would necessarily be lower than aggregate government tolls. I said that individual private tolls would not be much higher than individual government tolls today – which is a far different and much milder claim.

I then said that if Mr. Jetton wants to aggregate, then evaluating aggregate private tolls versus aggregate government tolls is not the relevant comparison. Rather, the relevant comparison is aggregate user costs under private roads versus aggregate user costs under government roads.

I summarize my position, which I believe to be consistent, as follows.

1. Individual private roads will not be much more expensive than individual government toll roads today (and will sometimes be less expensive).

2. There will be more private toll roads than government toll roads today, so aggregate tolls will likely be higher under a private system.

3. Aggregate road user costs, however, will be much lower under a private system than they are today. User costs will also be lower for the vast majority of individual road users.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

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