I advocate the complete, total, and full privatization of all roads, streets, highways, byways, avenues, and other vehicular thoroughfares. And I am serious about this—deadly serious.

This is so far off the radar of public-policy analysis and apart from the concerns of politicians, pundits, and commentators, that few people will take it seriously. Do not be one of them. Your very life may be at stake. For more than 40,000 people die on the nation's roadways every year, and you or a loved one might one day join this horrid list.

Do not be misled by the oft-made contention that the actual cause of highway fatalities is speed, drunkenness, vehicle malfunction, driver error, etc. These are only proximate causes. The ultimate cause of our dying like flies in traffic accidents is that those who own and manage these assets supposedly in the name of the public—the various roads bureaucrats—cannot manage their way out of the proverbial paper bag. It is they and they alone who are responsible for this carnage.

This does not mean that, were thoroughfares placed in private hands, the death toll would be zero. It would not. But, at least, every time the life of someone was tragically snuffed out, someone in a position to ameliorate these dangerous conditions would lose money, and this tends, wonderfully, to focus the minds of the owners. This is why we do not have similar problems with bananas, baskets, and bicycles, or the myriad other goods and services supplied to us by a (relatively) free-enterprise system.