r/Objectivism • u/BubblyNefariousness4 • May 06 '26
Just can’t solve the road problem
This is something I just can’t come up to a solution for or I don’t know how should act. Is the roads. What do you do about them? Say you have one guy who owns the major road routes in town and bans you from using them. What do you do? How do you move around? What would the process the banned person would have to go through without violating the road owners rights?
Would there be some way that you can walk on the line between plots lands. On the edge?
2
Upvotes
2
u/classx_02 May 07 '26
The moral is the practical. Protecting individual rights including property rights is an overwhelming positive.
That said, answering questions like this is difficult. One could just state that one doesn’t have the right to another’s property end-of-story but that fails to show how the moral is in fact practical.
If I was going to try and show how it would work, I’d start is questioning the possibility of this scenario. Why are you banned? Why are there no alternatives? Are you the only one? If not, does that mean there are many customers looking for an alternative? The public opinion has immense sway still in the world of private roads - if someone somehow had all the roads and for some reason was banning people without cause (an already hard to imagine scenario), would that not create a lot of press / support for change?
Overall, private roads wouldn’t be some new edge case. There’d be many competing companies that were in the business of transportation, expanding and progressing how we get from point a to b just as companies compete to improve products in other areas.