The question arrives like clockwork. Suggest reducing government scope, and someone will ask, with the confidence of a prosecutor presenting decisive evidence: “But who will build the roads?”

Libertarians groan. The question has become a meme, a drinking game trigger, shorthand for the statist imagination’s outer limit. Yet the groaning misses what makes the question genuinely interesting. The puzzle is why it gets asked at all.

Consider a parallel question nobody asks: “Who will bake the bread?”

Bread is more essential to human survival than roads. Civilizations thrived for millennia on dirt tracks; food deprivation ends societies within weeks. Yet nobody lies awake worrying about bread provision. The government-monopolized-bakery proposal sounds absurd the moment you formulate it.

Why does “who will build the roads?” seem reasonable while “who will bake the bread?” sounds ridiculous? The difference has nothing to do with the inherent nature of roads versus bread. Both are goods that humans value and pay to obtain, both require coordination of labor and capital, and both involve complex logistics. The difference is entirely a product of who currently provides each good.

Bread is private. It works. So thoroughly does it work that people forget to notice. Roads are government monopolized. They fail. So thoroughly are they monopolized that people struggle to imagine alternatives.

The roads question reveals something profound about what monopoly does to human cognition. We struggle to conceive of alternatives to what we have never experienced. The question is not evidence of the impossibility of private roads. It is evidence of the state’s success in capturing the imagination.

§The forgotten history

Private roads are documented historical reality.

In England, turnpike trusts administered over 30,000 miles of road by the 1830s. These were private organizations authorized by Parliament to build and maintain toll roads. They financed construction through bonds, paid investors from toll revenue, and competed for traffic. The results transformed the nation. Travel time from London to Edinburgh dropped from twelve days to four. Freight charges fell over forty percent. Engineers like Thomas Telford and John Loudon McAdam, employed by trusts, developed road construction techniques whose descendants we still use.

The system worked so well that even Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s collaborator, documented it approvingly. In 1845 he wrote that England “is now covered by a network of the finest roadways; and these, too, like almost everything else in England, are the work of private enterprise, the State having done little in this direction.”

In America, between 2,500 and 3,200 private turnpike companies successfully financed, built, and operated toll roads in the nineteenth century. Relative to the economy of that era, this private road network exceeded the post-World War II interstate highway system. Capital came from local businessmen and property owners who stood to benefit from improved transportation. The companies charged more for heavier vehicles and wider wheels, demonstrating sophisticated price discrimination. They adjusted tolls to attract traffic. They maintained their roads or lost customers to competitors.

The American turnpikes were mostly unprofitable as direct investments. Dividends were rare, yet investors kept funding them, because the indirect benefits, increased property values, expanded markets, reduced transportation costs, vastly exceeded the direct financial return. The question was never “will someone build roads?” but “how quickly can we get them built?”

When people ask “who will build the roads?” they are asking a question that history has already answered. Those who benefit from roads, businesses, property owners, travelers, have consistently demonstrated willingness to fund their construction and maintenance through voluntary exchange.

§The present catastrophe

What ended the private road era was government expansion, not market failure. As states claimed roads as their domain, private provision was crowded out. The result surrounds us.

Approximately forty thousand Americans die on government roads every year. Between 1899 and 2023, the cumulative toll exceeded four million fatalities. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of preventable death for Americans aged five to twenty-two. The United States consistently underperforms peer nations on traffic safety despite spending more on roads.

Consider what these numbers mean. Every year, government roads kill more Americans than died in the entire Vietnam War. Every decade, they kill more than died in World War II. This is the outcome of decisions made by government road managers who face no consequences for these deaths.

If a private company operated a product killing forty thousand customers annually, it would face massive tort liability, criminal prosecution, consumer boycotts, and competitive displacement. The company would either fix the problem or cease to exist. Government road authorities face none of these pressures. The same agencies that fail to prevent the slaughter collect the same tax revenue regardless of performance.

And yet people ask: who will build the roads?

The question reveals the depth of imaginative capture. Despite forty thousand annual deaths, despite congestion that wastes millions of hours, despite potholes and construction delays and every daily frustration of American road travel, people struggle to conceive of alternatives to the entity causing these failures. The state has monopolized the capacity to imagine roads being provided differently.

§The manufacture of dependency

This imaginative paralysis is the product of deliberate design, implemented over generations through institutions purpose-built to create compliant subjects.

The modern government school traces its lineage to early nineteenth-century Prussia. After Napoleon humiliated the Prussian army, the state’s intellectuals diagnosed the problem as excessive independent thinking among the citizenry. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher who designed Prussia’s “new education,” stated his aim explicitly: the destruction of free will. Schools would be factories producing obedient soldiers and workers who would accept authority.

The Prussian system sorted children by age into standardized classrooms, subjected them to standardized curricula, and evaluated them through standardized tests. At the bottom tier, the Volksschulen or “people’s schools” served ninety-two to ninety-four percent of the population. These schools heavily discounted reading because “reading produced dissatisfaction,” offering too many windows onto better lives and better ways of thinking. The goal was obedience: loyal soldiers for the army, compliant workers for factories and farms, citizens who thought alike on most issues, national uniformity in thought, word, and deed.

American reformers imported this system deliberately. Horace Mann, the “father of American public education,” toured Prussia in 1843 and returned infatuated with its methods. Within decades, Massachusetts had compulsory attendance laws, and by 1918 every state did. The Prussian model had conquered America.

The results are visible in the roads question itself. After twelve years of mandatory attendance in government institutions, students graduate incapable of imagining how society might function outside government direction. This is the system working as designed. As one Prussian-era observer noted, the system was “shaped with the express purpose of making ninety-five out of every hundred citizens subservient to the ruling house and to the state.”

Recent scholarship confirms the pattern. Agustina Paglayan’s research, published in the American Political Science Review, demonstrates that public primary schools were created by states specifically to reinforce obedience and maintain social order. Her analysis of data from forty countries shows education reforms consistently following periods of social unrest, with elites expanding schooling to indoctrinate future citizens to accept the status quo.

The mechanism is learned helplessness. When people repeatedly experience situations where their actions produce no meaningful change, they stop trying even when change becomes possible. The psychologist Martin Seligman, who discovered this phenomenon, observed that welfare systems create precisely this dynamic: “an institution that undermines the dignity of its recipients because their actions do not produce their source of livelihood.”

Government schools produce the same effect regarding social imagination. Children spend twelve years in institutions where attendance is mandatory, curriculum is standardized, and compliance is rewarded while questioning is punished. They emerge believing that someone must be in charge, that order requires commands, that complex social arrangements need central direction.

Then they ask: who will build the roads?

§The pattern repeats

The roads question is the most visible symptom of a deeper condition. Learned helplessness extends beyond roads. People who struggle to imagine private roads equally struggle to imagine private money, private courts, private defense, private education itself.

The pattern is consistent. The state monopolizes a service. Quality declines and costs rise, as they must when providers face zero competitive pressure. People grow frustrated but struggle to imagine alternatives because they have never experienced them and were educated to believe alternatives impossible. When someone suggests privatization, the response is always the same: “But who will provide X?”

Who will educate the children? Private tutors, religious schools, and home education produced higher literacy rates in colonial America than government schools produce today. Who will deliver the mail? Federal Express and UPS already outperform the postal service on every metric except the one protected by law. Who will maintain order? Private security guards already outnumber government police in America.

The state’s power rests on imagination. It rules because people struggle to conceive of being ruled differently. Every child who passes through government schools emerges with the unexamined assumption that government is necessary for civilization to function. This assumption is false, but its falsity is invisible to those trained from age five to believe otherwise.

The bread analogy exposes the absurdity. Something as essential as food, more essential than transportation by any measure, is entrusted entirely to private provision. Markets coordinate wheat farming in Kansas, milling in Minnesota, baking in thousands of local bakeries, transportation and retail, all absent any central authority directing the process. The result is bread available everywhere, in varieties suited to local preferences, at prices even the poor can afford.

If someone proposed that the government must monopolize bakeries because bread is too important to leave to market anarchy, they would be laughed out of the room. Yet the identical argument, applied to roads, sounds reasonable to most people.

The difference is entirely that people have experienced private bread and government roads. And they have been educated, by institutions designed to produce this result, to believe that what they have experienced is all that is possible.

§The real question

The question should be inverted. The real question is why anyone would entrust road provision to an entity that kills forty thousand annually and faces zero accountability, that fails to allocate road space efficiently enough to prevent daily gridlock, and that treats maintenance as an afterthought and construction as a patronage opportunity.

Something this essential, this central to economic life, this consequential in its daily operation, is too important to be managed by an entity structurally incapable of managing it well.

The people who would build the roads are the people who build everything else that works: free individuals coordinating through markets, responding to price signals, bearing consequences for their decisions, competing for customers by offering better service at lower cost.

History proves they can do it. The turnpike era demonstrates what free people accomplish when permitted to solve problems. Present catastrophe demonstrates what follows when they are prevented.

The only remaining question is whether enough people can escape the imaginative prison built for them since childhood, recognizing that the inability to conceive of alternatives is evidence the indoctrination worked, not evidence that alternatives are impossible.

Free men built thirty thousand miles of roads in England. Thousands of turnpikes across America followed. Free men will build the roads again, if only they remember that they can.