 My topic is privatization. If you get an email from me, you'll notice that at the bottom it says, if it moves, privatize it. If it doesn't move, privatize it. And since everything either moves or doesn't move, privatize everything. That's my motto. And what I'm going to do is make the case very briefly for privatization of anything. And then I'm going to apply it to privatization of roads and streets and highways, which I have a book on, which I make the case for that. The main reason for starting with that one is a lot of people say, well, but how would we have roads without the government? And the second one, I have a book out now, but it costs like $150, so I don't recommend anyone buying it. It's on why we should privatize the oceans and the rivers and the lakes. And the third book in this series that I'm now in the midst of finishing is why we should privatize the space race and why we should privatize the moon and Mars and stuff like that. Okay, so why privatize anything? Well, there are two reasons. One is ethics and the other is economics. The economics is that we're much more efficient because there are only two ways to allocate resources. One is private property and each person decides what to do with his private property. And the other way is through the government. And the private market has many advantages over the government in terms of just about any privatization of anything. For example, the time dimension in the dollar vote, which determines allocation of resources in the private sector, you can have a dollar vote 22 times a day or every hour or once a month, whenever you want. Whereas in the political sphere, you can only have a vote every four years or every two years or something like that. So we, the consumers or the voters have a much more tight leash on entrepreneurs as consumers than we have as voters over politicians. We can crack the whip, so to speak, on them daily or hourly whereas the other way we can only have an input every two or four years. Another one is focus. You can vote for a white shirt or a blue shirt or a green shirt or a pair of shoes of purple, whatever. Whereas in politics, it's a package deal. You have to take the whole package. I mean, suppose you like Hillary's, God forbid, policies one, one, three, five, seven and nine and you like Donald's two, four, six, eight and ten. You just can't pick. You have to take the whole package deal whereas you don't have to take any package deal in the market. You can pick policy one and two and three and four whereas in the other way you either have the odd number or the even number of policies, whatever they are. Another one is from my friend Brian Kaplan who wrote a book on rational voter ignorance. If you're going to buy a motorcycle, what you're going to do is ask your friends who have a motorcycle or read consumer reports on motorcycles and sort of learn something about motorcycles. Whereas if you're going to vote, you can be a low information voter and your vote counts just as much as a political theorist or a political scientist who spends years studying it so we can expect much less rationality from a procedure where you don't have to know anything and you get an equal vote. Whereas in the dollar vote, you get more dollar votes assuming a free enterprise system, not crony capitalism. You get more dollar votes the more you've contributed to society. Bill Gates gets many dollar votes. I get a moderate amount and the guy who's pushing burgers at McDonald's gets fewer dollar votes because of the contribution to society in some rough estimate. Okay, so that's the economic case for privatizing anything. What is the ethical case? Well, in the government it's based on coercion. In the market, every contract, every interaction, every commercial interaction is unanimously agreed upon. I bought this watch for 20 bucks and there was unanimous agreement between me and the guy who sold it to me. Whereas in politics, the winners win and the losers lose. Now, if you agree to be bound by the vote, that's okay. For having a chess club, and by the way, there'll be a chess tournament tonight at 7 or so. If you're having a chess club and you're having a vote as to whether to meet on Tuesday night or Wednesday afternoon and you've all agreed to be bound by the vote, well, okay, fine. But we didn't agree to be bound by the U.S. vote. Nobody joined the U.S. club. It's not a club. It's not a voluntary organization. So on ethical grounds, it's highly problematic. Okay, why pick the hard cases? Why not pick privatizing the post office or privatizing parks or privatizing garbage collection? Which are all very good and important things and there's a whole literature on why we should privatize the post office, why we should privatize parks and why we should privatize garbage collection and watch everything under the sun. But my own personality is sort of to take on the harder cases, even though I've contributed to those easier cases as well, because my thought is that if we can make the case for the hard cases, then it's easier for the easy cases. Whereas if all we do is confine ourselves to privatizing the post office, people say, oh, what about the roads? How are you going to have private roads? Okay, so let me start off with private roads. Why did I get into this? There's no intent that we should privatize roads and highways and streets. And the main reason is a lot of people die on the highways. A lot of people die. It used to be something like 40,000 a year. It's now down to maybe 35,000. It keeps varying somewhere between 32,000 and 42,000 a year. To put that in context, only 3,000 people died in 9-11. In Katrina, only 1,900 people died. Now, every life is precious. And the 1,900 people in New Orleans and the 3,000 people in New York City, it was a disgrace and a horror. But this is 35,000 people a year, every year. There are statistics as to how many people the government kills and Courtois and Rummel and some other people. I think in the last century, something like 270 million people were killed by governments. Not in wars, just killing their own people. But they don't count highway deaths. If they counted highway deaths, there'd be even more people killed. Now, the obvious answer or the obvious objection to what I just said is, well, look, it's not the government's fault. You anarchists, you're crazy, you blame everything on government, and I do. Any problem is the government's fault. I mean, cancer. Cancer is the government's fault because they take half the GDP and waste it. With the half the GDP, they make sure that the rest of us can't be as productive as we otherwise would have been. And had they not done that, we might have been four or five times richer. Maybe we would have cured cancer. I don't say we would have, but maybe we would have. So it sort of comforts me to know that any time anything bad happens, it's the government's fault. And whether it's bad breath or underarm deodorant problems, it's all the government's fault because they take the GDP away and they make us poorer than we otherwise would be. Okay, now the obvious objection to what I just said is, well, it's not really the government's fault. It's the fault of speeding or vehicle malfunction or a drunken driving or a driver inattention or anything like that. And my response to this objection is, these are just proximate causes. The ultimate cause is the government. For example, suppose we find out we're MBA people and we're brought in to find out why the restaurant failed. And we start listening why the restaurant failed. And the reason the restaurant failed, we say, is because of the cook, couldn't cook his way out of a, I don't know, plastic bag or whatever, couldn't cook too well. The waitresses were surly. They didn't clean the place. Location, they located on a cul-de-sac. And we start listening all these reasons. These are just proximate causes of why the restaurant failed. The ultimate cause is the manager didn't hire a better chef. The manager didn't locate the place in a better area. The manager didn't get a guy in Gimabrum or something. Let me give you another example. I now take a gun and I shoot it right through that wall and I kill the next guy that walks in front of the Mises Institute. And you all grab me and say, you're a murderer. You're a dirty rotten murderer. I say, tuck, tuck, not so fast. It was the bullet that did it. I'm innocent. I'm just, you know, I just went like this. Well, we would see through me, if I made that claim, we would see that the ultimate cause of the murder was me and the bullet was just the proximate cause. So I say that the ultimate cause of the road fatalities is not speeding and driving fast and drunk and driving and this and that and the other. It's rather the failure of the government to stop this. Now we know that competition brings about a better product. It brings about a better product in wristwatches and shirts and pens and anything you can imagine. Well, why not in highways? Why not have competition between different road owners to see who can deal better with speeding, to see who can deal better with drunk and driving, to see who can deal better with vehicle malfunction, to see who can deal better with whatever the problems that be set us. In other words, we have a good theory. Competition brings about a better product. Let's just apply it to areas where it had never been applied before. In this, I follow, to some degree, my dissertation advisor, Columbia Gary Becker, who started applying economics to areas that it wasn't applied to before he started in much. He would apply it to economics of discrimination, economics of crime, economics of this, that and the other that hadn't been applied to. So I owe something to him also, although Murray Rothbard obviously is my main mentor just about everything. Okay, one reason for, one motivation for me for writing about this is the number of deaths. And I think that we would reduce deaths by a great amount. What I did is I extrapolated from other areas where public and private run side by side, say garbage collection, and what they found out that in garbage collection, private is about four or five times more productive per ton of garbage collected. It costs one-fifth or one-fourth or something like that. And there's other areas where government and private both operate, say, in delivering mail, not first-class mail, which is illegal, but in parcels and stuff like that. And they find that there's a ratio of two to three to four to five times more. So what I did is I extrapolated and I said, look, if 40,000 people died on public roads, maybe 10,000 would die on private roads. One-fifth or one-fourth, something like that. And I was criticized by Larry White on this, and he said, well, you know, if that's true, if what I say is true, then government is only responsible, say, for 30,000 deaths out of 40, because if the private would kill 10,000 anyway, the government, you can't attribute more than 30,000 to the government. And what I said is my response to Larry White was, look, they say that Hitler killed 6 million people, the 6 million Jews, I think 11 million people. Let's just take the Jews. They killed 6 million Jews, but it took them four or five years to do it. During that four or five years, let's say 100,000 people would have died of natural causes. So was Hitler guilty of only killing 5.9 million? No. He's guilty of killing, say, he killed 6 million, because they would have died anyway. It doesn't let him off the hook for that extra 100,000. So similarly, what I'm saying is that if 40,000 people are killed by government, and 10,000 would have died even under private conditions, because private is not perfect. You're not going to get down to zero deaths if you're going at 70 miles an hour. You know, people make mistakes. There's a limit to what competition can bring us. We're not getting into perfection here. So I'm saying that they're really guilty for the whole, what is it, the full, what was that thing? The thing where they had that movie where they stripped down? I forget. I'm being incoherent. But I'll try to recoup here. Okay, so why is it that the full Monty, that's what I'm, the full Monty, they're responsible for the full Monty. That was the word I was looking for. I sometimes think I'm going senile, but then I remember when I was in 20s in my 30s, I also had these mental glitches. So I think I'm okay. Okay, so why, how could, suppose I ran a road. How would I try to save people's lives? And maybe you could think, if you had a private road, how would you save people's lives? And we would compete with each other to see. I mean, if somebody got caught drunk and driving, I would be very draconian about it. Not only take away his car, his whole car, the hell with this $200 fine, but you know, just take his car away and maybe chop off his nose or something. Because drunk and driving is very, very serious. And in my road, I'm going to compete with you and your road and we'll see who does better. Another one is, here are three roads, or rather three, what do you call it? The lanes in a road, A, B, and C. And the minimum is 40 on the highways and the maximum is 70. And maybe it's not speed that does it. Maybe it's the variance in speed. So maybe what we should do, instead of having a minimum of 40 and a maximum of 70, and you know when there's a maximum of 70, everybody's doing 75, except if you're a little old lady or somebody, hate to be a sexist and an agist, but what the heck? If you're a little old lady, you're probably doing 55. And there are people that do 40. I mean, they have a very slow car and most people are doing 70, 75, sometimes 78. So maybe it's the variance in speed, not the average speed. Maybe what we should do instead is have everyone has to do 50 here, 65 there, and 80 there. Maybe that would save lives. Do I know? No, I don't know. All I know is that the rules of the road come from Washington, D.C. in one fell swoop and everybody's got to do the same thing. Maybe this would save lives and I would try it and if it didn't save lives, well then maybe I would try 55, 70, and 85 or maybe 75, 65, and 55. Is it written in concrete that it has to be 40 to 70? No. In any other field, people could experiment and see which way would reduce deaths more. So that's one way to do it. Another way to do it is here is a two-lane highway and what you see is two trucks and you're in a car over here and what you're going to do if you're like me is you're going to try to get ahead of them because what's going to happen is that this truck is going to pull out here and it's going to take about 15 miles to pass them. And meanwhile you're going to zip along to try to get out from this road block, the moving road block. Well maybe we ought to have a rule that this stupid truck over here, this one is faster, he's got to slow down two miles an hour to let the guy through. And on my road I might kind of play doing that sort of a thing, giving him a big fine if he doesn't let the other guy get past him so he doesn't block up traffic forever. So then there's this other thing, maybe it's not speed, maybe it's not the variance in speed, maybe it's this sort of a thing where you have three lanes and here's some little old lady doing 50 miles an hour in the left lane and here's a car doing 65 and what's going to happen is people start wiggling around and changing lanes. Maybe lane changing is the thing to watch out for and what I'm going to do is have a very, very strong fine for people going slow in the left lane because the left lane is the fast lane. So it's these sort of things and in this book I've got all tons of suggestions as to how we might save lives. Another one is if I see a lot of deaths on a highway I'm going to have a big cross 50 feet high to show every death. Maybe that'll slow people up. I don't know. Maybe a Mohammed thing, what do you call it, the Crescent or maybe a Jewish store. I don't know. Something. In other words, what I'm doing is I'm desperately searching around because I don't know anything about this stuff. I'm just an Austrian economist who is trying to apply a competition to an area where it hasn't been applied to. There are experts in this field. One of the experts is a guy named Bob Pool who I really don't like because what he does is he consults for government and he tries to make government roads and national highway traffic safety administration more efficient and I think that's sort of selling out. I mean, if the NHTSA reads this book and finds it, well, my conscience is clear. I'm just saying how private roads would work and if they pick up, fine. But to go and confer with them and be paid by them and try to help them do it more efficiently I think is problematic from a libertarian point of view. Okay, another reason that I want to have private roads is this thing called traffic congestion. Now, you might not have much of that here although I spent the Katrina semester here and I tell you when there's a football game there's a lot of traffic around here. It makes New York City or Los Angeles look pathetic. I mean, people are going in around two miles an hour in their cars because there's just so many people here. So traffic congestion is another thing and it's not unrelated to debt because you have road rage and people are stuck in traffic going five miles an hour and somebody cuts in front of them and then you have problems that way. So here is a rough depiction of traffic patterns and here is six in the morning, nine in the morning, 12 noon, three, six, nine and here is the quantity of cars that are going, well, probably at around seven in the morning it gets big from seven to nine and then it sort of filters out here and then at around four o'clock it gets really big for four to six, something like that and then it tails off, right? Traffic congestion pattern? Yes, everyone with me on this? Okay, good. Well, we have a thing called peak load pricing. What's peak load pricing? Well, if you live in Veil, Colorado, the ski resort, do they charge more in the winter or in the summer? Obviously more in the winter because that's where the peak is and what peak load pricing does is pushes down because the higher the price, the less the man, right? The man curves slope downward and in the summer, they have very low prices there because they want to encourage people and people go there for a vacation because you can go on those gondolos and stuff and it's pretty nice but not as good as in the winter. Similarly, I used to teach at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts and Massachusetts peak load is October, November when the trees turn. It's really beautiful. They turn yellow and green and orange and well, not green, yellow and orange and purple and also and they charge triple the prices for a hotel which dampens down the demand and in the non-peak load periods, the hotel prices are lower. You get this thing in all sorts of things. They charge more for dinner than for lunch. They charge more for a movie on a weekend than on Tuesday matinee at 3 in the afternoon when no one comes. So what you would want from a rational road owner is to charge a lot during the peak which would push down the peak a little bit and during the other times of the period they would charge low prices to increase so you get some sort of flat usage of the road. Everyone with me on this? And this is the way to go. I mean if you have gigantic traffic jams like in Seattle or any of these big cities what you do is you charge a little bit more especially for the bridges or the tunnels or whatever it is like the Washington bridge. You charge very little at 3 in the morning and a lot at 6 in the afternoon but what does the government do? The government engages in high peak load pricing. How do they do that? Namely they exacerbate the peaks and the troughs. What they do is they give you a monthly pass for the bridge and if you buy a monthly pass the price per trip is lower right? And who is going to use a monthly pass? The guy who goes shopping once a month? No. It's the commuter who goes in every day. So what they do is they give you a cheaper price during the peak which exacerbates the things so it makes it even more of a peak and more of a trough. So again the government is screwing up the works and we have to stop them if we want to have rationality in road use. Now what I'm going to do is give a whole bunch of objections to what I just said and then I'm going to have chicken races. You know what a chicken race is? Two cars go on the same and whoever veers away is a chicken. And what I would do on my road between two and four in the morning I would get all the highways you know the regular traffic to go elsewhere but I would have one lane reserved for that and this is called culling the herd you know I mean people that would do this we don't want them on the road and if they and I can sell tickets because a lot of people want to see crashes you know so this would be a big part of my road well well not Keynesians it's a little different. One objection is if you had a private road you'd have to stop every three feet and put a penny in to pay a toll that's an objection and when I started writing this stuff this was in the 60s the universal product codes were first coming out there's a universal product code at the bottom of the book and what I was doing they were doing it in groceries and in pharmacies so I was reading all sorts of grocery journals and pharmacy journals to find out how this new technique would work because my idea was to stick something like that at the bottom of your car and as you go over a thing you get a bill at the end of the month and that's how you collect money you don't have to first of all not every private road would be for pay some of them would be lost leaders like when you go to Walmart they have a parking lot because they want to encourage you to go there and the parking is free well maybe the road leading up to Walmart would be free but if they want to charge you for it it doesn't mean that you have to put a nickel in the box every time you pass some guys house that would be crazy another one is how would we move from the present situation to the future situation so here we have a road let's say it's Magnolia Street right out there and here is the Mises Institute and they have a certain amount of frontage and here is McDonald's down the street and here is Auburn University and some people say well the way to privatize is that Auburn would get this amount and McDonald's would get that amount of the road and the Mises Institute would get that amount of the road and this is a crazy way to do it because anyone could set up a road block let's say the McDonald's said no one can get past my road my spot on the road well this is a very ludicrous way of transitioning from the present public ownership to private ownership a much better way would be to say okay well how many people are on this road I don't know say 300 people are on the road everybody gets roughly one 300th and now we have a corporation the road here corporation the majority stockholders and you can buy and sell stock and that would be the way that the road would function so you wouldn't have that problem of stop gaps okay another objection is how could you have private roads without eminent domain eminent domain means we're going to come and hear your land whether you like it or not and we'll pay you what we think is a fair price and if you don't like it you know tough okay so here's the situation we're in Atlanta and we want to make a road to San Francisco and ideally we'd like to make it as the crow flies straight or maybe a great circle if you want to be fancy about it how many people own land between Atlanta and San Francisco I don't know 100,000 a million a lot of people own land between the two yes okay so one way to do it is to buy options what you do is you go along and you buy this land and you buy that land but you don't buy the land what you do is you buy an option to buy the land so you go to some farmer and you say Mr. Farmer I'd like to buy your ten acres here in a long strip here because I'm going to make a road say six lanes ten feet each which is 60 feet and a 40 foot barrier between the two for grass or whatever so I need a hundred feet and I need a mile long but I'm not sure I want to buy it how much would you sell it to me for and he says oh ten thousand acres I'll tell you what I want to buy an option to buy at the agreed upon price of ten thousand an acre and I'll pay you a thousand dollars or five hundred dollars just exercise an option at my discretion within five years or whatever the period is and then you go along this road and you find over here my favorite cartoon character Cartman and you know Cartman's shtick screw you guys screw you guys screw you guys that's what he says and you come to Cartman he says I'm not selling tough well you don't have to build the road as the crow flies you could build the road like this like that like this like this where maybe the distance here is 15 miles and one way you could do is to just go along a b c d e f g and try to buy options on them all and as soon as you run into Cartman you say well I'm not going on that route and the options are relatively cheap compared to what the total price would be so another way is you announce you're building a road and here are the seven a b c d e f g paths that you're going to take and get the people along there to coalesce and whichever one gets there first you'll double the price of the land or something like that in other words let them do the work but suppose that Cartman owns land like that 15 miles north and south now what are you going to do I mean Cartman is prohibiting us from building a road the only way is eminent domain or expropriation as they call it in Canada in other countries well my son and I Matthew when he was about oh I don't know 15 or 17 we discussed nothing but this for about two years and finally we came up with a solution and I published it as one of the chapters in this book and came the question well he didn't write one word but the ideas were a mutual occurrence from our discussions and my policy in co-authorship is to bend over backwards to give other people more credit if there's any question so I made him co-author and he objected he said no one would believe that I helped look I'm just a kid and I said but is it true he said of course it's true I said well I don't care what people believe we'll go with the truth so he and I co-authored an article on this and then Gordon Tullock excoriated us in an article and then I wrote a comment back so I have a little debate going on in this book with Gordon Tullock who was a very eminent public choice theoretician who loves the government even though he's supposed to be a free enterprise so what did my son and I come up with well in order to explain that we have to get into football what's going on in football here is football and here are the end zones and we have our ball right here and we want to move in this direction is it easier to move when we're here or when we're here obviously when we're in point A not point B because we have more field to throw throw the ball or to run the ball whereas they have a gold line stand and the offensive team is lucky to get three yards in four tries everyone into that okay so with that in the background let's get back to Cartman and Cartman has 15 miles north and maybe one mile wide or something like that a patch of land like that and what my son and I decided upon is we'll build a bridge over him or a tunnel under him and the problem with that is a thing called add colon the add colon doctrine add colon says that if you own a square mile of the earth you own down into the core of the earth and up into the heavens that's the add colon doctrine you own a square mile think of an ice cream cone down into the center of the earth and up into the heavens this would play havoc with airplane travel and it would also prohibit slant drilling slant drilling is here are two guys x and y and x goes down and then under wise land and this is not allowed but we are libertarians we don't care about what the law says what matters is what the just law says and what the just law says based on people like John Locke and Marie Rothman and Hans Hoppe who have done magnificent work on this is the add colon doctrine is wrong rather we go for homesteading whoever homesteads at first gets to own it well nobody homesteaded 300 miles down nobody homesteaded well I shouldn't say nobody homesteaded up here the airplane company is homesteaded up there so they get to 30,000 feet without having to drop a dime in every farmer's lot as they go by so there's nothing wrong with homesteading digging under Cartman or building a bridge over him because the add colon doctrine is wrong at least we reject it but the counter argument is this gets a little complicated Cartman now knows that we want to build a road and he wants to stop us so what does he do he wants digging sticks down and sticks up so he homesteads first but the problem is getting back to the football field Cartman is in trouble here is my football field here it is here is my football field the problem is that Cartman has got a problem because he's got 15 miles to defend all we need is 150 feet wide 6 lanes, 60 feet 100 feet so he can build sticks 15 miles long up to 30 feet or down to 50 feet all we have to do is go under his sticks or over his sticks so and I think now it would cost some money but the point is in monopoly theory we Austrians don't count number of competitors because there is such a thing as potential competition here is here is my picture of California and in California there was shut up I won't brook any criticism you can criticize my economics but my artistry is beyond criticism that didn't come out right there was a railroad that was playing havoc with the farmers they would say we're going to charge this for peas and then when the pea crop came in they would triple the price why didn't somebody else build a railroad 10 miles to the east because there was crony capitalism in order to build a railroad you had to get the permission of the California state legislature which was in control of the railroad in the first place but the point is that suppose we had free enterprise in California which is like a logical contradiction here suppose we had free enterprise in California and there was this one railroad J and they were playing havoc with their customers and their suppliers and doing all sorts of nasty things the last thing they want is another railroad so even the potential of competition would slow them down and make them behave themselves so it's very similar getting back to the last thing he wants to do with us where he's got a defensive goal line of 15 miles long and our football is only 100 feet wide so this is my answer to the objection that we need eminent domain we don't need eminent domain we can build roads without eminent domain and I think that's an important point because libertarians are not really big fans of eminent domain okay another one is privacy if we have electronic charging suppose you want to go visit your proctologist or your I don't know you're having an affair and you don't want your wife or your husband to find out about it and there are records well you know you could pay a little bit more for privacy privacy is not a right privacy is a benefit it's a positive right namely a matter of wealth so I don't think that that's a a crucial problem or a crucial objection another one is the blockade okay so here is a road here are two roads and you have a house right there that's your house and you buy your house and now you try to get out onto the road and the owner of the road says oh that'll be a million dollars each every time you get in or out you have to pay a million dollars namely he's trapping you that would be another objection well right now before you buy a house what you do is you get title insurance what's title insurance make sure that the person who is selling you the house is the real owner and if he's not the title insurance will make good on the like if somebody else comes along and says what are you doing in my house we bought it from this guy but I own the house well you have title insurance well under a regime of private roads you would have a thing called access insurance namely you wouldn't buy a house until you found out what's the deal can I get out on the road or are you going to charge me an arm and a leg every time I get out on the road does the road owner have an incentive to behave yes he wants people to build houses on his road I mean if it's an empty road with nobody there he can't charge anyone anything empty roads like the road to nowhere like in Alaska the way the government runs roads is based on who has political power in the senate and you have all these roads with no traffic and then there are other roads just tons of traffic the roads would be built based on consumer preferences not based on political pull and there wouldn't be any of this problem of entrapping people onto their property because they would want you to build a house or a factory or something there and the only way they could encourage you to do it is to guarantee that they wouldn't charge you more than anyone else or whatever the deal would be worked out one other objection is the natural monopoly some people say well there are natural monopolies and roads are one of the natural monopolies no here's this California thing that proves that that's not so that potential competition obviates all monopoly the only monopoly you see for the mainstream monopoly is a single seller duopoly there are two oligopoly there are a few we Austrians don't look at it that way what we look at it is their potential competition the only time this monopoly is like when uber is trying to set up in some city and they won't let him well that's a monopoly or when the Duke gets the salt monopoly because he fought the good battle and now anyone makes salt you have to you can't make salt unless you get his permission and you have to pay him for it that's a monopoly but number of sellers in the free market is not a monopoly so roads are not a natural monopoly I had a big debate with Richard Epstein on this eminent domain business at the University of Chicago I forget whether it's in this book or not but he is a very very bright guy and very quick and even though I was right I had a hard time with him kept interrupting me very pushy ethnic persuasion my ethnic persuasion forget about that okay I've done enough on roads and I wanted to do most on roads but I do want to talk a little bit about oceans and rivers and lakes and things like that because as I say that book is now about 150 bucks but the way this publisher does it they want to sell it to libraries they're depending upon an inelastic demand curve but in a couple of weeks or a month or so they're going to come out with a paperback which will be something like 25 or 30 bucks and then you know be more within reason and I think the Mises Institute will carry it then but I told them not to carry it now because nobody's going to buy it anyway okay so what's going on with oceans why am I motivated to write a book that we should privatize oceans rivers and lakes well one reason is Katrina 1900 people died and it wasn't Katrina Katrina didn't hit us Katrina went 40 miles east of New Orleans into Mississippi and we just got a little peripheral winds you know a few buildings were knocked down but it wasn't really Katrina's fault it was you'll never guess the government's fault and in this case it was the Army Corps of Engineers their barricades to keep the water where it's supposed to be just fell apart now look in an ordinary case where the Army Corps of Engineers was running the river and they screwed up this beautifully what would happen they'd go broke and we'd get somebody else see the market is not perfect but the reason we have pretty good shirts and pretty good pens and pretty good eyeglasses and pretty good everything in the market is because we have not such pretty good stuff they lose money and they go broke and the resources go to people who can do a better job but you don't have that in Venezuela you don't have that for anything in the Soviet Union you didn't have much of that that's why those countries were so bad and again I'm just trying to apply this insight very very basic economic insight of private property and competition and apply it to the river well who should own the Mississippi River well similarly the way I said with the roads you know we wouldn't want one guy to get all the roads where do I have that here it is remember I did that road business well it's the same with the Mississippi River you would make a Mississippi River Corporation and you would have ownership shares based on the frontage on the road on the river on the assumption that if you had frontage you were probably using the road I mean if we had a God's eye view perfection we would know who owns the river the people who used it but we don't so I'm sort of extrapolating here so the people who had frontage on the on the side of the Mississippi River or the people who run those boats or the people who are swimming or fishing or whatever now you have Mississippi River Corporation and if they do a good job they'll make money and if not they won't and it'll pass to someone else why the oceans there was this great movie Star Trek where our boys in the 23rd century were getting in the neck from the boys in the 25th century who were more knowledgeable and they were kicking their butt why were they kicking their butt anyone know no whales the whales had disappeared and the 25th century guys liked whales and in the 23rd century there were no whales so our boys in the 23rd century had to come back to San Francisco and get a whale and bring it back to the 23rd century so the guys in the 25th century would get off their case so I'm worried about this and we now have to ask well why are whales disappearing and the reason whales are disappearing is the tragedy of the commons what's the tragedy of the commons when you own something in common or when it's unowned it gets dissipated I now have to show you a picture of a cow and a buffalo and notice the cow is smiling because he's not extinct and the buffalo is unhappy because he is going extinct wait I have to put horns on these guys okay and so here's the buffalo and here's the cow and why is it that the buffalo was going extinct because he couldn't own them and you would have the opportunity cost of shooting one would be virtually zero because if you didn't shoot him you wouldn't have him anyway whereas if you shoot your cow or slaughter your cow you have a very high cost of shooting him or slaughtering him because you don't have him tomorrow and you would have had him tomorrow because it's private property well the whale is just a buffalo with a, I don't know there's a fin and there's a space and you better lighten up in your criticism of my artistry because I don't like that and also the elephant is just a cow with a funny nose and the rhino has got a different kind of funny nose the reason these guys are going extinct is because of the tragedy of commons if you don't own it or if it's owned in common well then you dissipate it and if it's owned privately like the cow was it never goes within a million miles of extinction for a while the alligators or the crocodiles they were disappearing and then they were allowed to be owned and now we have crocodile farms and people use the skin and the meat and whatever so the trick is privatization another reason for privatizing the ocean is what percentage of world GDP is on the land and what percentage of the world GDP is on on the water and probably it's 99 to 1 it's hard to get statistics on this but my estimate is that 99% of world GDP comes from the land and 1% comes from the ocean and yet the ocean is three quarters of the earth surface it's very similar to what happened in the Soviet Union there it was 97% of the land was publicly owned and it produced 75% of the crops and the private holdings were 25% no 3% and produced 25% of the crops namely this is wild disparity between private ownership and public ownership in the collective farms they let the machinery rust out in the field whereas if you own the machinery, farm machinery you would take care of it because it's your livelihood so that's one reason for privatizing the the oceans and the rivers and the lakes and the aqueous body of water I think the title of the book was something like privatizing the oceans, rivers and lakes and I wanted to put mud puddles too but somehow better heads prevailed and I couldn't get mud puddles in the title mud puddles are very important because of what the government is doing now they call it a water resource if you find a mud puddle and they try to take over your mud puddles I mean they're just the government is berserk but you know privatizing roads and privatizing oceans and rivers and lakes are not on the agenda I mean Hillary and Donald are not going to debate the best way to do this nor will Gary Johnson I mean it's not on the agenda but it's important theoretically that we be clear that private property rights are the solution and government is not the solution okay the third book in this series is privatizing space why am I privatizing space? because I am a humanist I know it sounds like a sexist or a racist but what the heck I'm a humanist namely I like human beings and I like the idea of human beings surviving and my thought is that the way things are going now we're going to have a nuclear war and it would be really nice if we had a colony on Mars and one on the moon so that at least some human beings would survive the Misha Goss craziness that's Yiddish that's going on with governments we had a colony on the moon in the Mars and we had privatization of the space race or the colonization we would be much more likely to get it than if the government is doing I mean the government in Austrian economics there was such a thing as the structure production and based on time preference rates and one of the points that I make in that chapter I have a co-author here Peter Nelson is my co-author in the space book the oceans book one of the problems we had we got a man on the moon or some taxpayer on the moon in the 1970s who was premature maybe what we should have done is spent more time on rocketry or telescopes or whatever just because you get a man on the moon you want to get these things done in the right timing timing is important and they went prematurely to the moon maybe if we didn't do that now we'd have a moon colony who knows I think we would do better with private rather than public so to summarize if it moves privatize it if it doesn't move privatize it since everything either moves or doesn't move privatize everything and think in terms of privatizing not the easy things like the post office or the sanitation which is important but think in terms of you know more radical privatization thanks for your attention