What to Do Until Privatization Comes — Summary

This file is a short, single-author political-economic essay by Murray N. Rothbard. Its scope is transitional rather than programmatic: Rothbard assumes the libertarian case for privatization and asks what should be done with existing state operations before privatization is achieved.

Free-market advocates are clear about what should be done about government services and operations: they should be privatized.

The thesis is that free-market advocates need a theory for the interim, and that this requires dividing state activity into two kinds. “Group A” consists of public operations that, however badly, supply services people want: mail delivery, roads, libraries, schools, police, and fire protection. “Group B” consists of coercive agencies—regulators, tax collectors, prohibitory enforcers—whose activity is not a poor substitute for market provision but an attack on private life. Rothbard’s first conceptual move is therefore to separate privatization from abolition.

On the activities in Group B, what we want is not privatization but abolition.

For the second group, efficiency is not a virtue. A privatized tax agency or an efficient regulatory commission would only sharpen coercion; short of abolition, such offices should have smaller budgets and less capacity. The difficult question concerns Group A, because people must still use public facilities while reform is pending. Here Rothbard briefly invokes John Kenneth Galbraith’s image of “private affluence” beside “public squalor,” only to reverse its meaning. Four decades of public-sector expansion, he argues, worsened rather than cured squalor; the problem is not too little government but government provision itself.

The essay then attacks what Rothbard calls the dominant “equal access” view, associated with courts, left-liberals, and some libertarians. In this view, a public facility must be open on terms that prevent ordinary exclusion, discipline, or standards. Rothbard argues that this makes public services unable to perform their own functions: schools cannot keep order, streets and libraries cannot protect ordinary users, and universities lose academic standards. His property-rights premise is that ownership entails the authority to preserve the purpose of the property.

But this “equal-access” view deliberately brings the rule of the jungle into every area of government activity, thereby destroying the very purpose of the activity itself.

The examples are polemical and sometimes abrasive, but their argumentative role is precise. Rothbard is not trying to make public institutions attractive as permanent state enterprises. He is arguing that a government-run school should at least be run as a school, a library as a library, and a thoroughfare as a thoroughfare. The absence of private ownership should not be converted into an ideological commitment to disorder.

Rothbard’s sharpest criticism is aimed at libertarians who support public-sector deterioration as strategy. He sees only two explanations: either they have accepted left-liberal premises about access, or they believe that worsening public services will shock citizens into demanding privatization. The second possibility draws his strongest ethical objection, because it deliberately adds burdens to people already living under statism and risks making libertarians appear to be part of the problem.

If the latter is the reason, I can only say that the strategy is both deeply immoral and not likely to achieve success.

The work’s structure thus moves from principle, to classification, to critique of egalitarian administration, to a practical rule for the interim. Rothbard’s proposed policy is not to celebrate government management, but to administer useful public services according to their intended purposes while cutting budgets and pursuing eventual privatization.

What then is the second, and far preferable, theory of how to run government operations, within the goals for cutting the budget and ultimate privatization? Simply, to run it for the designed purpose (as a school, a thoroughfare, a library, etc.) as efficiently and in as business-like a manner as possible.

The essay’s relevance lies in its insistence that anti-statist theory must address transition. Rothbard distinguishes opposing the state from sabotaging public users, and abolition from privatization. His conclusion is pragmatic but not statist: better interim administration is justified because it reduces needless harm while keeping the final objective intact.

These operations will never do as well as when they are finally privatized; but in the meantime, that vast majority of us who live in the real world will have our lives made more tolerable and satisfying.