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Many of us pay twice for the highways we use – with fuel taxes and with tolls. Most folks are aware that 15% of Federal fuel taxes are stolen by mass transit. How many know that tolls paid by drivers are also being diverted to mass transit?

Bridge tolls in both New York and San Francisco are currently funding mass transit programs.

Not only that, they started moving to the suburbs many decades before Americans even had cars, hence the term 'streetcar suburb':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

And note that such suburbs even predated street cars:

"Although electric streetcars were not introduced until 1887, suburbs did exist earlier based on animal-drawn cars, but the distance they could be from a city core (where most jobs were located) was more limited."

Lastly, there's little doubt that Americans are willing to pay the cost of highway-building — in the form of fuel taxes (some portion of which are, in fact, not spent on highways, but are redirected to subsidize mass-transit and bike paths).

Like AIG gave away its mortgage backed securities? Fat chance.

Even if they paid cash to buy it, assuming the government (or a new private owner) paid an appropriately reduced price it could still be a money maker for the buyer.

Right. I can't wait to read about all the profits the TARP raked in.

The issue is efficiency. Would a quasi-private system of road construction and maintenance really be more efficient, in terms of constructing useful roads and maintaining them at reasonable cost, if proprietors know that unprofitable roads never fail?

Even if proprietors nominally "lose money" when building unprofitable roads, would it make any difference if they borrow the money anyway and simply declare bankruptcy after pocketing handsome compensation during years of construction and initial operation? Would lenders be more discriminating if TARP-like programs often bailed them out?

Would this "privatized" system really be any different from the public system, or would it only create opportunities for nominally "private" rent seekers?

I'm a minarchistic, but I'm not convinced that "private" rents are any less costly than "public" rents. [I don't refer to conventional "rents" reflecting the real marginal value of real capital here.] If market forces don't really operate, then "privatization" only privatizes "profits" while socializing costs.

This more fascistic system is not an improvement over road socialism and seems worse to me. It's a Hobson's choice, but if forced to choose, I'll choose socialism over fascism.

Two distinct theories seek to account for the manifest benefits of market organization.

One theory says that market actors seeking profit just make better decisions than central planners unconstrained by the profit motive. This theory still credits clever planning with the success, but it requires the proper "incentive" on the part of planners.

Another theory says that market actors might as well plan by throwing dice, because the key to market success is creative destruction, not clever planning. In other words, market organization is like evolution by natural selection.

The truth lies somewhere between these competing theories, but I have a lot more faith in the latter than the former.