Laurent Carnis

Abstract: The private provision of road services and road privatisation has been extensively studied and has generated numerous debates among scholars. Block and Tullock exchanged on the possibility of having a completely privatised road system. Tullock defends the idea such a system is not viable, whereas Block shows a free market for road provision can be easily conceived.

This article proposes a re-examination of this debate and defends a pragmatic and realist approach. Although it shares Block’s conclusions on the possibility of having a free market for road services, it justifies them on a different ground. In fact, the ‘physical obstacle’ argument is less important that it could be previously imagined but it reflects more a socialist tendency to pose the problem.

Laurent Carnis

To Serve and Protect is a breath of fresh air in the fog of mainstream recommendations concerning security, crime, and punishment. In the mainstream literature, liberals typically regard the offender as the victim of an egoistic society and conservatives typically say that the only way to reduce crime is to increase the severity of punishment. Benson brilliantly shows that the solution to the problem of criminal justice does not rest with increasing law-enforcement budgets or imposing harsher punishments, but with privatization.

To build a roads system, an administrative price mechanism—commercialization—may yield some solutions to the problems of public roads but it gives rise to other problems