Dusan Vilicic Held

“We can bring about a laissez-faire society, but only through the tremendous, invisible power of ideas. Ideas are the motive power of human progress, the force which shapes the world. Ideas are more powerful than armies, because it was ideas which caused the armies to be raised in the first place, and it is ideas which keep them fighting (if this weren’t true, political leaders wouldn’t have to bother with their tremendous propaganda machinery). When an idea gains popular support, all the guns in the world cannot kill it.”
― Morris Tannehill, Market for Liberty

“a perfectly competitive industry is an utter impossibility in the real world. The requirements for this status are numerous and ridiculously otherworldly: completely homogeneous products; an indefinitely large, not to say infinite, number of both buyers (to stave off monopsony)5 and sellers (to preclude monopoly); full and complete information about everything relevant on the part of all market participants; zero profits and equilibrium. The reductio ad absurdum of this objection is that, not only could roads not be privatized under such impossible criteria, but neither could anything else be. That is, this is a recipe for a complete takeover by the government of the entire economy; whether by nationalization (communism) or regulation (fascism), it matters little.”
― Walter Block, The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors

“If congestion occurs on the free-market transportation network, the response is likely to resemble what accompanies “excess demand” for any other good or service: the businessman does not rest day or night until he provides the extra services the market is clamoring for. (We again abstract from the possibility of price increases.) The ice cream shop with long lines of people waiting for admission hires additional workers as soon as possible; the economist who “suffers” from the “congestion” of large numbers of people clamoring to engage him as a consultant hires more staff or expands output in whatever way seems appropriate to him. Throughout the private economy “congestion” is looked upon as a golden opportunity for expansion of output, sales, and profits. It is only in the public sector that the customer clamoring for additional service is looked at askance,33 blamed, excoriated, and told to desist in his efforts.”
― Walter Block, The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors

“It is when positive use prices are allowed that businessmen see an opportunity for profit making by curing the excess demand, or “congestion” situations. It is here that private enterprise shows itself head and shoulders above the bureaucratic, statist system which operates without benefit of prices for services rendered.”
― Walter Block, The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors