 I've got two o'clock, so I'm going to start. I'm Walter Block. I'm going to be giving a lecture on privatization of everything. I've published about 25 books, and I only have two series. The others are just individual books. My one series is defending the undefendable one, two, and I'm now working on three. And my other series is the privatization series. And here I also have three books. The first of these is privatization of roads and highways. The idea here was that highways, streets, roads, avenues should be privatized. And my main impetus for that book was about 35,000 people a year die on the roads every year. And that's horrible. We just heard about these kids in Thailand, the soccer kids, and I don't know, 15 kids. And everyone went berserk over these poor kids, which is proper because all human life was precious. But 35,000 people a year, and nobody says squat about it. My second impetus for this was congestion. If you live in a big city, during rush hour, you're traveling at, oh, two miles an hour, and the fastest way to get around is by bicycle, maybe. The second book in this series is a thing called Water Capitalism, the case for privatizing oceans, rivers, lakes, and aquifers. I wanted to put mud puddles in there too, but the publisher rebelled against me. It was a rebellion. Here I have a co-author, Peter Lothian Nelson. The way I got him was, see, I don't really know about water all that much, but I never let things like lack of information stop me. But I knew I needed somebody who knew something about waves and stuff like that and pressures of water. I don't know what that is. All I have is this theory. We've got to privatize it. My motto is, if it moves, privatize it. If it doesn't move, privatize it. And since everything either moves, it doesn't move, you privatize everything. But still, I didn't know much about water. So I sent out a memo, I think, on the Lou Rockwell, courtesy of Lou Rockwell, saying, I need a co-author for this. Would somebody write something about some lake in Florida? And if I like it, I'll co-author the book with you. And if I don't, you're free to send your article somewhere else. And I got Peter Lothian Nelson, who is an engineer of oil. But oil has water pressure or oil pressure. So it was the same thing. And the third book is, oh, and the reason for this one is we're running out of resources, fish resources, and then Captain Kirk. Remember one of those Star Trek movies where the guys in the 25th century were kicking the butt of the guys in the 23rd century where our guys were from? Why because they were no whales? So I'm not making this up. It's an actual movie. So they had to go back to the 20th century to get whales to bring in the 23rd century so the guys in the 25th century would lighten up. Does this sound science fiction-ish? It's a real movie. But the point is that we're running out of whales. Why the transient of the commons? So that's one reason. Another reason is I'm from New Orleans. And 1,900 people died in the aftermath of Katrina. And the thing that really bugs me as an economist is that the people who were responsible for that, the Army Corps of Engineers, were still in business. Where does it imagine if McDonald's killed 1,900 people? At the very least, there'd be no more McDonald's. Which is why we have pretty good shirts and shoes and wristwatches and eyeglasses because if you don't do a good job, you go broke. But in water resources, you don't have that because it's not privatized. The third book in this series, I wish I could show it to you. It just came out and the publisher sent a copy to me in my office in New Orleans. But I don't have it here. This is privatizing the moon and Mars and all the planets and the space race. And my impetus for this is I'm really pro-human. I hate to admit this, but I'm a humanist. I really like people. And some of my best friends are people. And my fear is that we're going to blow ourselves up one of these days. Poor Donald is trying to make nice with Russia and people are going berserk. Why, we should have a war with Russia? I mean, that's not very sensible. So my fear is that we're going to blow ourselves up. And I have grandchildren. They just were born. They're three years old. And maybe one day they'll live on Mars. And if the earth blows itself up, at least we'll have some people on Mars and on the moon maybe in 10, 20, 30 years. So that was one of my impetus, apart from just privatizing everything, for privatizing the space race and also the planets that we'll find or the moon. OK, let me now, with that introduction to the three books, go over each of the three very briefly and see what we get. I'll pick oceans first. Oceans are a pain in the neck. The problem with them is that the water goes from the oceans up into the, if it gets evaporated into the clouds and then it rains here and then you get some sort of river and then it goes back into the ocean. So you get a circular flow of water. And we do have a theory that you can't privatize stuff that's not scarce. Like my views on intellectual property mean that once the idea is out there, it's not scarce anymore, so we shouldn't privatize it. And yet, part of the water circular flow is not scarce. So how do we do that? I mean, the clouds are not scarce. So that's a problem. Another one is this commie, Nozick. Well, look, I once got in a debate with Milton Friedman. I called him a road commie or road service host. And he is. I mean, he favored government roads. And Nozick, I mean, Milton Friedman is a good guy on many issues. And Robert Nozick is one of our chief libertarian theoreticians. But he has this crappy thing about your poor can of tomato juice or can of tomato soup or something into the ocean. And ha ha ha, you can't get to own the ocean. Namely, how silly it is to own the ocean. Well, that's ocean communism. And we're against communism, right? So we're against ocean communism, road communism, water communism. We're against all kinds of communism, unless it's voluntary communism, but that's a different kind of an issue. OK, why privatize anything? There are two main reasons. One, economics. It's much more efficient. The market is more efficient than government. And let me get a, I think I've got, oh, here it is. Here is a USSR collective farms. And we have, in the Soviet Union, they were, what was it? The land, the public collective farms were 97% of the land, and 3% were private. And on the public lands, they grew 75% of the crops. And on the private lands, only 3%, they grew 25% of the crops. So you can see this vast disproportion, which indicates that private is more efficient than public. We've already given one sort of Henry Haslett reason why that is, because if you do a bad job, you lose money, you lose money, you go broke, somebody else takes over. So that's one reason for it. Another reason for it is ethics. If it's private, it's voluntary. If it's government ownership, the government gets involved, and the government is predicated on taxes, and taxes are involuntary. And anything involuntary goes against the non-aggression principle. So from an ethical point of view, we should have the least government possible, and ideally no government at all. OK, so what's going on in oceans? In oceans, the water acreage of the surface of the earth is about 75%, and the land is about 25%. And on the 25% of the land, 99% of the world GDP is created. And on the oceans, which is 75% of the earth's surface, only 1% of the GDP is created. These are rough estimates. It's really hard to get good, solid statistical evidence on what GDP is produced here and what's there. And this is a little unfair, because there aren't too many people on the oceans, most of us on land. But all sparing love war-end statistics and trying to prove for free enterprise. So you hit below the belt, it's OK. We are now on the hunting and gathering stage with regard to the oceans. You remember the old people in the audience remember in the caves, when we were in the caves and in the trees? That was a joke, not a very good one. But what the heck? We were hunting and gathering. We weren't farming. Now, we do have a little fish farming, but 1 millionth of 1% of the oceans or of the water resources we have is fish farming. And all the lefties are against fish farming. Now, the salmon that they produce there are no good or the fish they produce there are no good. We're in the hunting and gathering stages. What we need to do is farm the oceans. And how do you farm the oceans? You privatize it. You own the Mediterranean. You own the Pacific. You own the Gulf of Mexico. Or your company does. Somebody else owns the Mississippi River. And now we can get into a little bit better than we were in the caves or trees, namely, hunting and gathering. Another issue is a real hot issue that really perturbs all my colleagues in the biology department at Loyola and in the environmental commie environmental department at Loyola. And what they say is we're losing what is it some number of football fields of land to the Gulf of Mexico? Namely, the Gulf of Mexico is creeping in and taking over the land. Well, what's the right proportion of land and water? We economists have a theory as to what the right proportion is of, say, parks and farms or between land for housing and land for industry. And what's our theory? Well, whatever allocation comes about in order to maximize profit. If we have too many farms and not enough parks, some people will convert farms into parks. If we have too many parks and not enough farms, well, then some people in parks will go broke if they were private parks and they would convert it into farms. So we have a reasonable allocation. We have a reasonable allocation between shoes and shirts, right? We don't have shortages of one and surpluses of the other. Why not? Because of any incipient tendency to have shortages of surpluses in any one thing, the market will operate so as to obviate it. But we don't have that with land and water. We don't know whether the football field should go this way or that way. Maybe we have too much land. We need more water. I don't think that's preposterous. It's conceivable. But in order to find out, we have to privatize the water. Then another impetus is the water of the UN law of the Sea Treaty. What the UN law of the Sea Treaty is is that everyone owns one over N or there are seven billion of us. So we all own one seven billionth of every ocean. Can you imagine that sort of a situation? You know, somebody in the middle of Iowa owns a part of the ocean even though he's 2000 miles away from the ocean. We wouldn't have any preposterous organization of that sort in any other field, but we have it here. Then there's drought, drought all over the place. In Africa, the drought means people die because you're not allowed to ship water from one place to another. Canada, blessed Canada, they're up to their armpits in water and they have rules about exporting water. You can't export water. So you have drought in California and water galore in Canada and the price of water in California since it's in such great shortage is very high and the price in Canada is very low. So you'd think in any rational arena they would export water. But no, somehow water is different. You can't have commercial activity in water because water is, I don't know, whatever. It shouldn't be commercialized. Then there's the case of the Chinese people that are building reefs in the South China Sea. You know, they take some sand bar that's half submerged and they put a lot of sand in there and then they build it up and they put in some military equipment or whatever. And then that's okay, that's no problem. I don't mind that. But then what they do is they declare a 12-mile circle around every little atoll and reef and that makes it impossible for anyone else to go anywhere around there. Namely, they're claiming all the water just based on what they did on the land. That is improper. How then should we get to own these things? Well, I'd go back to John Locke and Murray Rothbard. The way you get to own things, according to libertarians, is by homesteading it. So take the Mississippi River. Who should own the Mississippi River? Well, the Mississippi River Corporation, a private corporation. And who owns that corporation? All the people that have been using the Mississippi River. Now, the Mississippi River goes right by New Orleans. So I see these boats. By the way, the boats are a little higher than the land because New Orleans is sort of below the Mississippi River. So you can see those boats going up there. Well, everyone who's got a boat gets 100 or 110,000 of the shares of this corporation. Everybody that's got land alongside the Mississippi River on both sides, because we assume that they've been using the water because they're there. Anyone else who can make a case, you know, I swam the Mississippi River or something, I get a share of it. And that's it. So we have a theory as to how you privatize land. And all I'm saying is you should apply it to water. And my thesis here is that water is just fast-moving land. Land is slow-moving water. Namely, I'm trying to extrapolate from what we do on land because we do pretty well on land compared to how well we do on water. And there is slow-moving or non-moving water, namely ice, sort of sits there. And then there is moving land. Mudslides and volcanoes is moving land. See what I'm trying to do is look at the similarities between land and water. And my critics would say, oh, no, no, they're totally different. Yes, you can have privatization of land, but certainly not of water. And I'm trying to amalgamate them. When cattle were first, we first had a cattle industry before the advent of barbed wire, how did we figure out who owned which cow? Branding. Then came barbed wire. Well, we now could have branding of whales. All you do is you shoot a little, I don't know, electronic device into the whale, and that's your whale. Now look, there might be rustling, whale rustling, but there was cattle rustling. Just because there's rustling doesn't mean you can't have an institution of private property. So at least we could get up to where we were with branding of cows. But then we did much better with cows, we had barbed wire. But we can have barbed wire now. We have electronic capabilities of making fences in bodies of water. We have too much fish freedom. The fish are going, it's like anarchy, those fish. They have no respect. We gotta corral them. We gotta make barns and corrals. We gotta do on the water what we've done on land. Otherwise we're gonna still be on the hunting and gathering stages, which means only so many few people could live compared to if we rationalized it and privatized it. Okay, that's sort of a glimpse at that book, non-existent book, but I assure you, no, no, that is an existing book, that's right here. Now I'm gonna get to the non-existent book, which you'll have to trust me. The publisher said it's published, so we'll talk about that, the space book. What should we do with space? Why should we privatize space? Well, there are two aspects of it. One is the land on the moon and the land on Mars. How should we figure out who should own what swallows the moon or what swallows the Mars? Well, again, we go back to Locke and Homesteading Theory and we extrapolate from land on earth to land up there in the heavens, the heavenly bodies. Murray Rothbard used to say that east of the Mississippi, 160 acres was a reasonable amount for a family of four to have because the farmer could homestead that amount and it could keep a family of four alive. West of the Mississippi, the land is less fertile, so Murray said 1600 acres would be more reasonable that a person could, a family of four could, what do you call it, homestead, and the intensivity of the homesteading would be a little different because there's an issue. Well, if you're gonna homestead, how intensive does the homesteading have to be? You're gonna put a corn plant every inch, every foot, every yard, every acre, every 10 miles squared, whatever, and here you get the continuum problem. So let me just talk a little bit of the continuum problem about which there is no answer. I like to approach this in two ways. One is what is the proper age of consent for sexual rape? We know that if you go to bed with a five-year-old girl, you are a statutory rapist, even if she agrees, because we don't think she has any capacity to agree to any such thing. On the other hand, if you go to bed with a 25-year-old woman and she agrees, you're not a statutory rapist. Well, where should the line be? Should it be 14, 15, 16, 17? I don't know. There's no one right answer. You can't say, well, it's 16 years and two months. Well, what about 16 years and three months? What about 16 years and one month? And does it matter if a boy of 16 years and three months goes to bed with a girl of 16 years and two months, or if the girl of 16 years and two months goes to bed with a 50-year-old man? These are continuum problems that there is no one right answer. And you just sort of have to have some sort of consensus or private courts or even government courts. God help us or legislatures to make some sort of reasonable distinction. Another one, I'm now going to punch you. Would you be justified in shooting me? No. Because look, we're having a lecture here. I can't reach you. It's silly. On the other hand, I'm going to punch you with this fist. And now there's the light glinting off my watch. And it's a dark alley. And you think that maybe it's a knife. And you shoot me? Well, that's self-defense. Well, how close and in what context do you have to be in order to have rationality? There is no one right answer. You need some sort of rational man or average person. Or you need a God's eye view to make a determination. It's a gray area. There is no solution. You can't say, well, it has to be 14 feet away. And it has to be this much light and darkness and whatever. Because it's always the context. I mean, in a play, if somebody punches somebody else, the other guy can't really shoot him. It's a play. So I say it's the same thing with land on the moon or Jupiter or Mars or whatever. And as I'm extrapolating from what Murray said about eastern Mississippi and western Mississippi, and the more fertile the land is, the more intensive and the longer you have to homestead it in order to become the owner of it, the less fertile it is, the longer you have to homestead it, the less you have to homestead it, sorry, and the less intensive you have to do it. So if you're homesteading land in the middle of Alaska, you don't really have to do it that intensively. And if you're homesteading land in the Sahara Desert, maybe even less intensively. And if you're on the moon, even less intensively. So the problem is somebody plants a flag over. Let's say there are no Indians and the white man comes and plants a flag and says, I own the whole kitten caboodle. Well, that's way over the line. On the other hand, if he's thought mixing his labor and he puts in a crop, well, then he owns this area. So how much land should the guy who landed on the moon have? The whole moon, no. Half the moon, no. One third, no. Couple of 100 square miles, yes, because it takes a lot of effort to get to the moon, especially with present technology. I was talking to somebody about Jupiter. And I think that would take even more activity to get to Jupiter, so you get more land. And I think it's even less fertile than Mars or the moon. I'm not sure about Jupiter. But this would be the idea as to how we would decide who gets what part of the moon or what part of the Mars. What I'm not saying, I'm not in this book, I don't, me and my co-authors do not say that the reason we should go to the moon and Mars is because of overpopulation. I'm not a Malthusian. I don't think that we have an overpopulation problem. I don't think we ever had an overpopulation problem. And my reasoning here is the existence of slavery. Notice that we can't be at the level of just mere survival. Malthus was saying, when you have more population, you get down to the level of survival. And when you have less population, we can grow the population. But it has to stay roughly where survival level is. Well, the institution of slavery, and notice I'm now doing a positive analysis of slavery, not a normative. I'm not saying whether slavery is good or not. I'm just saying the existence of slavery shows that we never had this overpopulation problem. Because suppose we did, and people could only produce what would sustain them, or subsistence level. See, that's the view of the overpopulationist, the Malthusians, its subsistence level. Well, if we were at a subsistence level, would it pay to capture a slave? No. Would it pay to keep a slave? Would it pay to buy a slave? No. Because if we were only at the subsistence level, the slave could only produce enough to keep himself alive. So why would anyone want one? He can't produce any more than keeps him alive. But the fact that we had slavery shows that even slaves who had to have guards and stuff, otherwise they'd run away or rebel, even they were way above subsistence level. So this Malthusian overpopulation theory is wrong. And I reject that reason for going to the moon or Mars. OK, so now I've discussed a reason not to worry about that overpopulation. I've discussed how we can get to own the moon and Mars. Now let's talk a little bit about the space race, or the effort in the direction of that. And here I have to mention this guy named Elon Musk, who is made great contributions. Because before him, what the government would do is shoot up a rocket, and then the rocket would fall into the splatter, and that would be it. Imagine if every time you went to shopping or to the movies, the car exploded after you got there. And you'd have to get another car. That's no way to run a railroad to mix my metaphors. So Elon Musk, bless him, came up with this way of reusing the rocket. The rocket goes up. The rocket comes down with, I don't know, some sort of mechanism so that it doesn't crash and burn. Some of them do crash and burn, but some of them we can reuse. Well, that's a great, great impetus for getting off the planet. On the other hand, he's a bit of a crony capitalist, a bit. That's an understatement of the world. On the other hand, I'm not necessarily against crony capitalists as a libertarian. I'm not against taking money from the government, because the government is an evil institution. It's a thief. Relieving the thief of his ill-gotten gains is a mitzvah. It's good. So the question comes, I had a little debate with Ron Paul over, should he accept matching funds? And he refused to accept matching funds. And I think, pragmatically, that was right. That was correct, because if he would have, they would have said, well, you're a hypocrite. You're against government doing this, and now you're taking government money. And they criticized Ayn Rand for taking Social Security. But my favorite character in Atlas Shrugged is Ragnar Danishkold. What did Ragnar do? What did my man Ragnar do? He took money from government against their will. He was a pirate. He took money. That's great. I mean, the less money the government has, the better we are. So I encouraged Ron Paul on deontological grounds, not pragmatic or utilitarian grounds, to take that money. He didn't listen to me. He didn't take it. But on pragmatic grounds, I think, was right. Look, we all use fiat currency. We all use public streets. We all go to the library, a public library. We go to the park. We use government all over the place. We're not hypocrites. We are taking away from the government that which it shouldn't have had in the first place. So that's good. So now the question comes, is Elon Musk one of the good guys and one of the bad guys? So what my co-author and I did was we read a whole bunch of his speeches. And guess what? He's not a libertarian. So we're a guinem. However, if there were a libertarian guy doing this, I would say, God bless you. Go take all the government money you can. OK, that's pretty much it for the oceans and the space. Let me now talk about roads, roads, highway, streets, whatever. And you'll remember that my main impetus for this was the death, many, many deaths on the highways. And also congestion as a minor impetus for writing this book. And here's that book that came out. I forget about 10, 15 years ago. The oceans was more recent. And the space is just coming out. So what's going on with roads? Why do I think we'd have fewer deaths if we had a road privatization? Well, we'd have competition. Right now, the rules of the road come from Washington, DC. And there's one rule of the road for the whole kit and caboodle of the country. And that's it. We don't have any competition between different ways of running it. Now, right now on the what's highway close to here, the highway 85, you have three lanes. And the minimum is 40. Whoops, let me zoom this way. Here we go. The minimum is 40, and the maximum is 70. And you know if you're doing 70, everyone's going to go whizzing right by you. So people do 75, 78, stuff like that. And some people do 45. So maybe it's not speed that kills, but rather the variation in speed. I don't know. I'm not a road theoretician like Bob Pool, the commie. He's a road theoretician. He tries to testify at the NHTSA, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Little applause. No, I'm kidding. I don't testify. And I'm not an efficiency expert for the state. I don't try to make their roads run better. I come up with all sorts of reasons. And if they adopt it, that's not my problem. So I don't feel guilty about saying maybe how roads should be done. But maybe instead of a minimum of 40 and maximum of 70, everybody should do 55 here, 70 here, and 85 there. Would that be better? I don't know. Nobody knows. The point is that we will never find out. Whereas if you did the road that way and somebody else did the road 50, 70, and 90, and somebody else did 60, 70, and 80, and different people had different rules of the road. And some would work better than others, no? I mean, isn't that why we have good shirts and good wristwatches? Because different people are free to do it in different ways, different styles, different inputs, different outputs, different whatever. So that's one reason why just that one example, if we had different speeds maybe on the different lanes, it would be better. The common sense sort of indicates that if we try different things and some things work better than other things, then the people who isn't working too well, they'll adopt what is working better and will reduce deaths that way. I mean, this is serious business. 35,000, 38,000 people a year die. And nobody says squat about it. Then another problem is you get some guy over in the left lane who is doing, oh, 65. And you've seen that. And now everybody has to go around them. And maybe what is going on here is not so much speed, but lane changing. So on my road, what I would do is I say, anybody doing that, I'm going to kick his butt. I'm going to be very, very serious. Now there are signs, state of the right if you're slow, but everybody ignores that. You don't get a ticket for doing 68 in the left hand lane. Then another one, here's a two lane highway. This sort of really ticks me off. Here's a two lane highway. And here are two trucks, truck one and truck two. And you know that this truck is going to come out here and try to pass the other truck. And you know it's going to take 15 minutes from the past. You know this. So what you do is you shoot up to 95. They call me the road warrior. You shoot up to 95 so you can get past this. Well, maybe on my road, what I would say is this truck over here that's going to keep this faster truck, this is the faster and that's the slower truck. Let them go by for God's sakes. Don't make them creep by you one inch at a time for every minute, an inch of minute. And the truck is, I don't know, 50 feet long. So it takes 10, 12 minutes to get past. So what I would do on my road is I would say that there's a rule that any truck that blockades all the cars for more than two minutes is going to get a big ticket. This is sort of just common sense. I mean, I never took a course in engineering. I don't know anything about roads. I just drive and I make comments. But the key element that I'm providing is not so much these little tricks as to which way will work. These are just examples. The impetus, what I'm really trying to do here is just apply Henry Haslitz's economics in one lesson to an area where he didn't apply it, namely competition between roads. He applied it to competition between groceries and competition with this and competition with that. I'm applying it to roads. So in the book, I've got maybe 15, 20 different kinds of things like this, where I think it would be better if some roads tried it and other roads didn't and the ones that learned from the others, we would do better. Do I think that in a fully privatized road system there'd be no debts? No, there'd be some debts. And what I did here in this book is I hear a single author, so it's just me. What I did is I extrapolated from the other areas where the government and the private are going side by side. For example, garbage collection. It costs the government roughly five times as much as private to remove a ton of garbage. Another one would be post offices, FedEx and Pony Express and all those others, Pony Express a while back. FedEx does much better, again, by a ratio of two to one, three to one, four to one, five to one. Something, various statistics where I extrapolate from and say if we had private and the private were as efficient vis-a-vis government in roads as it is in these other areas, this is how many debts we'd have. And I came up with 10,000. Namely, we'd still have 10,000 debts. Namely, we'd save 30 or 25,000 debts. So Larry White, my critic here, says well then the government really isn't responsible for 35,000, it's only responsible for 25,000. Do you get it? Namely, I'm saying we'd still have 10 and let's say right now we have 40, so the government is only responsible for 30. My criticism of that is let's stipulate that Hitler killed six million Jews. But it took him four years to do it, right? Four or five years and during that time through the natural deaths of elderly people, let's say a hundred thousand people would have died. Anyway, so is Hitler responsible for six million people that he killed or for 5.9 million because a hundred thousand would have died? No, six million, he killed six million. I don't care that the other ones would have died anyway. The blood of all of them are on his hands, well then the blood of all 40,000 are on the government's hands, not just a few. By the way, when we libertarians take over and we have a Nuremberg trial, the people responsible for these debts, we're gonna have to deal with them. Okay, let me do traffic congestion just a little bit and then I'll talk about objections because half the book, three quarters of the book is filled with objections. We can't do it for this reason, can't do it for that reason, can't do it for the third reason. So what's going on with congestion? With congestion you have this thing called peak load pricing. Peak load pricing. And here is quantity. This is not a supply and demand curve, this quantity is usually on the other axis and this is time. So this is six in the morning, this is noon, this is six p.m., this is midnight. So what does the traffic look like? Well, the traffic is very low here and it goes up in the morning rush hour and then it's sort of flat. In some cities it's high, 24 hours a day but in normal cities it's not quite that bad. And then at 4.30 it gets really high and then it lowers. So what is peak load pricing? Peak load pricing is you charge more during the peaks. And if you charge more during the peaks the peaks will flatten out and this stuff will increase. So instead of having oscillations like this you'll have oscillations like that and if you do it perfectly there won't be any oscillations, probably there'll be some. What does the government do instead of peak load pricing? Which would be the, look, peak load pricing is done in Florida. The good season in Florida is the winter. And in the summer they charge a little less because nobody's coming there relatively and in the winter a lot of people go to Florida so they raise the price. I used to teach at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. And the peak season there when the leaves turn it's really beautiful, the leaves turn pink and orange and yellow and stuff around October, November. So the hotel prices are up through the roof during that time. The same thing with Vale, Colorado. The peak load there is during the winter when people ski. So during the non-ski period during the summer right now you can still go there and you can go on those lifts but it's much cheaper the hotels. Namely they're trying to flatten out the oscillations. So in all sorts of private areas you have peak load pricing, not here. Instead what do they do here? They have these HOVs, high occupancy vehicle lanes. And my daughter-in-law has two twin boys of age three. She whizzes along because she's got three people in the car. Those little beasts are counted as people. Whereas you get a doctor or a lawyer who's making 500 an hour and he's stuck in the other lane because there's only one person, which is imbecilic. I mean, I love my daughter-in-law, but still. This is non-economic. Or they say carpool. Well, if you had peak load pricing then people would naturally carpool. Because if it costs a lot to go during the morning or the afternoon then people would naturally gravitate. Namely the Adam Smith's invisible hand would work. Whereas right now all the government does is exhort you to be nice and be considering carpool. Well, they have these stupid buses that take a half hour to get to and then five buses come along and then you wait an hour for the next one. So the government way of dealing with this problem is nonsensical, especially on bridges, what you should do. Now, see here I don't want you to think that I'm a Bob Pool efficiency expert for the state telling them what to do. I'm just saying in private enterprise that's what they would do. And if somehow a government person reads this book and decides to do that, well, that's not really my fault. OK, let me now talk about a whole bunch of objections. One objection is, here are four roads. And here's your house. And all the roads are private. And you try to get in or out of your house and this road owner, road A, says, well, that'll be a million dollars, please. Namely, a blockade. You'll be blockaded in there. That's one objection. If we had private roads, they'd blockade you in. You wouldn't be able to get in or out, except for a million dollars every time you travel. Right now, if you buy a house, what kind of insurance do you get? Title insurance? You buy title insurance to make sure that the guy who's selling you in the house is really the owner of it. And the title insurance company will indemnify you if somehow he's not the owner and some real owner comes up later. Well, under the area of free enterprise, instead of title insurance, you get access insurance. Or, before you bought that house, you would inquire, hey, how much is it going to cost to get out on that road? And if the guy says a million dollars, you're not buying the house. Does the road owner have an incentive to be reasonable? Does the road owner want people to have houses on the side of his road? Well, of course. Nobody on the side of the road. Who's going to charge for anything? See, he wants to induce you. He's going to compete with other owners to get you to buy a land so you could have a house there, or a factory, or a school, or whatever it is. So that would be the solution to that problem. There won't be any blockading, because the owner of the road has an incentive to woo you into putting your facility on his road so that he can have some traffic, have some customers. Okay, another objection. Another objection is that the real reason we have debts is not because of government roads, it's because of speeding and drunken driving. Now, I've already discussed speeding, and I said it might be the variance in speed, not the speed, although I'm not sure about that, but I speculate, maybe driving under the influence. My reaction to that objection is as follows. It's the difference between the ultimate cause and the proximate cause. Now, look, suppose I take a gun, and I shoot right through there, and there's a guy walking down the street, and I kill him, and now you all grab me and say you're a murderer, and I say, ta, ta, ta, not the murderer, it was the bullet that did it. You'd wonder what kind of drug I'm on. Namely, that's the proximate cause, but I'm the ultimate cause. Yes, the proximate cause is maybe speeding, or maybe drunken driving, or maybe people behind the wheel who shouldn't be behind the wheel, but the ultimate cause is the manager. Look, suppose a restaurant goes broke. We have Mama, what's her name? Mama Goldberg. Mama Goldberg goes broke. Why do we say Mama Goldberg went broke? Was it because the cook was lousy, the place was dirty, the food tasted bad? No, we say it was Mama Goldberg's manager or the owner. She didn't hire a good chef. She didn't give someone a broom and tell them to go and clean the place. So you see the difference between the ultimate cause and the proximate cause. Yes, the proximate cause might be all these things that everybody says is the cause. The NHTSA lists all about 300 proximate causes. There's this guy, Sam Peltzman, a Chicago economist. Boo, boo. And he writes about this, but he's a Chicagoan. So what do you expect? They're all commies over there. And he lists about 25 different causes of road fatalities. He never mentions the goddamn government. Can you imagine an Austrian or a libertarian economist writing about deaths on the highway and never mention the government? But he's talking about the speed, vehicle malfunction, texting, driver error, maybe he lists 25 and then the NHTSA lists about 200 all proximate causes. No ultimate cause. The ultimate cause is the manager, the owner, the government. Okay, one last thing, and that is what's it called, the holdout problem? And do we need, what do you call it? Government take, imminent, thank you. Okay, so here we are, we're near Atlanta and we're thinking of building a road to California and we want to build the road as the crow flies. Do you know how many people own land between Atlanta and California? I don't know, a couple million. So what we do is we start buying up land here, we buy land there, we buy land here, we buy land there and all of a sudden we get my favorite character on TV. What's my favorite character? It's Clark Cartman. It's Cartman. So yeah, I'm getting senile and whenever I can't think of something in my class, the student of mine on town helps me and he's graduating and I'm thinking of failing him so he can stay. Cartman, and you know Cartman's motto, screw you guys, screw you guys, screw you guys. So Cartman is a holdout and Cartman says over my dead body or for a trillion dollars, yeah, I'll sell you this square mile that I happen to own. So what we do, instead of going as the crow flies, we go this way or instead of buying up land, what we do is we buy up options. You know what an option is? An option is you go to this guy over here and you say, look, I'm thinking of building a road there but I'm not sure. How much do you want for your square mile? And he says, oh, 10,000 an acre. I say, okay, that's a good deal, I'll buy it but I'm not sure I want to buy it. So I'll pay you $10 an acre just for the option so I can buy it within two years at my discretion. And then when you get enough options on any of these roads, then you build that road or you announce here are the five ways of building A, B, C, D and E and you say whichever of you guys get together first, I'll go that route. And everyone will try to help me because I'll pay more than what the land is worth as a farm. But Cartman owns that plot. So what are we gonna do? Well, my son and I, we got into a big fight with, what was his name, the public choice guy, not Buchanan Tulloch. Tulloch and I got into it in the literature and what I said was if Cartman is that nasty, what we'll do is we'll build a bridge over his land or a tunnel under it. We don't have this thing called, what's it called, Ad Column. There is this doctrine, Ad Column, that if you own a square mile on the surface of the earth, you own down to the core and up into the heavens which would make airline travel a bit rough. But the point, see, we don't believe in Ad Column, we live in turns, we believe in homesteading and Cartman hasn't done anything three miles under or two miles above. So we build a bridge over or a tunnel under. So then the objection to that is that Cartman realizes we're gonna do this, so what Cartman does is he starts putting sticks down there and sticks up there so we can't build a bridge and we can't build a tunnel. Now we have to talk about football. Now in football, here are the end zones and you know that if you're over here at point A you've got a whole bunch of places to move so it's easier to move when you're at point A whereas when you're at point B, it's really tough because all you have is a little space to work at, right? And they can have a goal line stand and you're lucky to make one yard and four tries whereas over here you don't make one yard and four tries. Well the point is how big is our football? We want to build a six-lane highway, each lane is 10 feet wide, that's 60 feet and then a median of 40 feet, so all we need is 100 feet. Cartman has to defend 15 miles. So wherever he puts sticks, he's got a defense of 15 miles and all we need is 150 feet. So what I'm saying is that the eminent domain argument, the criticism that you need eminent domain in order to have private roads is fallacious. Thanks for your attention.