Whenever someone suggests that we don’t need a monopoly government, the hackneyed response is, “But who will build the roads?!” This happens so often that it’s become an inside joke in market-anarchist circles.
The objection is usually presented as a mic-drop, as if, absent government, we’d have to give up automobiles and just walk everywhere — or perhaps descend into some Mad Max off-road-vehicle nightmare. Sadly, people’s intuitions tell them that since roads are long, connected things many different people use, only a sovereign who can tax and impose uniform rules can supply them.
The assertion isn’t that politicians and bureaucrats actually go out in the hot sun to lay asphalt or carve grades in mountains. People know that the actual building of the roads is performed by private firms with graders, asphalt plants, engineering talent, and road crews. It’s men and equipment that build roads, not government.
Needless to say, such firms could be hired to pave flat surfaces between here and there for any customer. Nothing about the physical act of paving a road requires that the customer be a tax-funded monopoly.
What critics mean is that only a monopolist authority can coordinate the interplay of roadways, ensuring that “enough” of this public good is provided and the resulting system isn’t too chaotic. The claim is that coordination must be imposed from on high rather than emerging when it benefits owners to cooperate.
The theoretical obstacle usually offered is that roads are “public goods” — meaning, among other things, that it’s difficult to charge people for their use — so private parties will be less likely to provide them. As multiple economists have amply demonstrated, the concept of public goods is somewhat incoherent, if not downright propagandistic. There may even be no such thing as a public good.
But even if one accepts the concept of nonrivalrous, nonexcludable public goods, roads fail to qualify. A paved surface becomes excludable the moment someone can control access to it: a gate, a transponder, a license-plate camera, or a subscription checked at the on-ramp.
As to rivalrousness, haven’t we all experienced a traffic jam? More cars added to the road increase wear, crowd other drivers, and slow the rate of speed. Congestion and maintenance are ordinary costs of roads, just as any other private good.
Once it is possible to exclude drivers or require them to pay for access, the classic public-goods argument loses its force. We already have countless examples. HOAs, shopping malls, apartment complexes, industrial parks, and private resorts are already demonstrating how private actors can provide roads, security, and other so-called public goods. Owners are incentivized to build internal streets because they raise property and business values. They set speed limits, parking rules, and liability terms because uncontrolled use would destroy that value. The same logic scales to other streets and thoroughfares. All the government needs to do is simply get out of the way.
Walter Block’s extended treatment of private road provision addresses all these issues in great detail. A private owner captures both the benefits of a better surface and the costs of a worse one. Therefore, that owner has a direct interest in thickness of pavement, drainage, lighting, snow removal, and rapid clearance after a crash — precisely the details that politicized road agencies routinely neglect.
Pricing can vary by axle weight, time of day, measured congestion, or any other relevant metric. The upshot is that the driver who imposes more cost pays more. Our story illustrated this on the Kane family’s dashboard — ticking upward with speed and density and awarding a credit for a safer detour. There is no need for a cop waiting behind a billboard speed trap to incentivize good behavior. Instead, it can be a price the driver sees and reacts to.
But Wouldn’t This Lead to Chaos?
Rules of the road raise a separate worry. Wouldn’t it be chaotic if every stretch of road or network of streets had its own owners and covenants? The concern is that uniformity must be legislated rather than contracted.
In practice, connectivity and interoperability are valuable. Road owners who want through-traffic are incentivized to adopt and negotiate compatible standards. As we saw along the Kane’s route, insurance companies and protection agencies, which must price risk across jurisdictions, become natural translators and mediators. This is a function insurance companies already perform; they would just need to scale it up.
A policy that covers Lex-1 (a fictional private legal protocol) roads and notes the stricter enforcement on a Sentinel stretch is doing what insurers have always done when covering their clients across different jurisdictions with different rules, codes, laws, and norms. Reciprocity agreements — already routine in many other areas of commerce — let a traveler move without having to stop to renegotiate terms at every boundary.
Where incompatibility persists, it persists because the local owners value the difference more than the loss of traffic. The coastal enclave’s quiet hours and screened gate exemplify this. In a free society, different rules for different areas are a feature, not a bug. People who want the opposite sort themselves onto roads whose owners advertise the opposite.
Enforcement also follows ownership. The owner (or an insurer contracted to manage claims on that pavement) will make or lose money based on the road’s reputation and the damage caused by users. That is why the vignette’s response crews and mobile arbitration pod have an incentive to clear lanes quickly and determine fault without creating a traffic jam due to bureaucratic indifference. State-owned roads are a mess because the owner has little incentive to care whether they are a mess or not.
David Friedman and Bruce Benson have documented how, in the past, people solved disputes privately through reputation, bonding, and exclusion from future dealings. Likewise, Edward Stringham has shown contemporary private governance performing similar functions inside stock exchanges, shopper associations, and online platforms.
None of these requires a single court with a geographic monopoly. They require parties who can refuse future dealings and insurers who can refuse future coverage. The driver who causes a crash and then tries to bail on restitution finds the next toll road, the next rental, or the next policy more expensive — or perhaps unavailable altogether. Repeat players — trucking lines, insurers, road operators — will favor simple, stable rules because unpredictability is costly to them.
Wouldn’t the Poor Be Priced Out?
But what about the economically disadvantaged? Don’t we need a monopoly provider of streets and roads so that poor people aren’t priced out of travel? If roads were private, wouldn’t they be trapped where they are, unable to afford to go anywhere?
These are understandable concerns, but they quickly dissipate on closer inspection. First, many roads are inputs to businesses. A grocery, factory, housing development, or beach association may charge nothing at the curb, preferring to recover the cost in rents or retail margins. That is not charitable giving; it is customer acquisition and retention.
We see this kind of behavior by businesses all the time. Commerce thrives on foot traffic. Providing access by road is just like providing air conditioning—so customers enjoy being there.
We must also compare apples to apples. The relevant comparison isn't some imagined world where every low-income driver gets a free, uncongested lane on command. It is the world in which the same driver currently pays regressive fuel taxes, sales taxes, and the time-cost of congestion that no one has an incentive to clear. Monopolists are famously terrible at the provision of goods and services — to the poor, or anybody else.
Longer roads and limited-access highways are the use case most often declared impossible to provide privately. They also have the clearest precedents for privatization. Nineteenth-century turnpike trusts in Britain and the United States built thousands of miles by selling shares to people who expected toll revenue and land appreciation.
Merchants and landowners often promoted early American turnpikes because a toll road raised the value of everything alongside it. If fewer people used the road, the road owners might lower the toll or remove it altogether. Where a toll remains, free markets have other means to lower costs for people in poverty. Off-peak discounts, pooled subscriptions, employer-provided transit stipends, and charity road credits are private responses, not political ones.
Modern private road operators already operate major sections of road under contract. The difference in a fully private setting is that the company owns the well-run and well-maintained asset and can sell it — and as we know, it is ownership, not bureaucracy, that begets responsibility and stewardship.
Who Should Own All These Roads?
Privatizing the roads isn’t impossible. Ownership can begin with a simple assignment. Existing streets and roads can be deeded to associations of local businesses in commercial areas, to a users’ association where traffic is predominantly residential, or to the highest-bidding firm where the road is a long-distance artery.
One could argue that such allocation might be inelegant or unfair, but so is the state and its taxation schemes. Perfectly clean ways to “undo” state expropriation and abuse don’t exist, yet there is good reason to undo them.
If we start with a reasonable-ish allocation from state hands to private ones, Ronald Coase’s insight on the allocation of rights does the rest: Once rights are defined and transferable, they naturally migrate toward the parties who can put them to higher-value use. A neglected county road whose neighbors would pay to improve it changes hands. A congested freeway whose operator can charge peak tolls and add a lane does so, because the lane’s revenue exceeds its cost.
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Take the QuizOur current political roads lack such feedback mechanisms. Private ones would face it daily.
None of this implies that a single pattern or blueprint must arise in the private production of streets and roads. Some neighborhoods will embed roads in covenants and recover costs through dues. Some commercial corridors will treat the provision of roads as fixed infrastructure – simply the cost of doing business. Some trunk routes will post per-mile prices that rise or fall based on congestion and other factors. Some scenic associations will keep speeds low and solicit voluntary contributions for the beautiful views.
The Kane family crosses several of these arrangements in a single morning and — with the help of reciprocity and mutually beneficial cooperation among businesses — takes the differences in stride.
That is the analytical point skeptics most often miss. The alternative to monopoly provision isn't to swap it with one elegant private system designed in advance. That would defeat the point. Market anarchy is an ongoing trial of ownership forms, pricing methods, and rule sets, with losses falling on the owners who get it wrong or fail to adapt.
A private operator who can be sued, dropped by insurers, or avoided by drivers internalizes the cost of potholes, ambiguous signage, and poor rules. A public agency that funds itself through taxes and enjoys sovereign immunity does not.
Electing better officials does not solve the knowledge problem that attends any attempt to declare the optimal mileage, the optimal speed regime, and the optimal maintenance standard from a central office. Rather, we “dissolve” it by decentralization and seeing what emerges. We must allow the people who bear the costs to experiment. The result is better order — a natural order.
Historical private turnpikes were not perfectly smooth, any more than early railroads were perfectly safe. They improved where competition and liability were allowed to operate, and they stagnated where politics corrupted the incentives.
Putting It All Together
Both history and theory direct us to the same conclusion, at once modest and radical. Modest, because the firms, insurers, associations, and pricing tools already exist; they have simply been crowded out by government. Radical, because removing the territorial monopolist removes the presumption that one set of rules and one funding formula must bind everyone who wishes to travel.
The Kanes on the coastal road are not driving through a utopia of identical preferences. They are moving in a world where exit is cheap, entrance is conditional, and costs are borne by the responsible parties instead of uncaring functionaries.
That is what the trope “who will build the roads” overlooks. The roads do not require a sovereign. They require the stewardship of owners incentivized to provide these important goods and services without being crowded out by an indifferent, uncaring, monopolistic sovereign.
Who will build the roads? Private owners responsive to the desires of their customers. Offloading that job to bureaucrats was a mistake.
