You got a silly reductio ad absurdum answer... but also asked a silly question. Compare: "What if someone bought all the movie theaters, and then prohibited th

You got a silly reductio ad absurdum answer... but also asked a silly question. Compare: "What if someone bought all the movie theaters, and then prohibited the showing of movies?!?" The thing is, people who buy theaters buy them because they want to show movies. People who run roads want them to be used. Sure, you could have a few eccentrics with destructive rules. They will not thrive. There may be innovative rules that appear eccentric at first, but turn out to offer offsetting benefits in allocation-of-limited-capacity-to-most-productive-uses. This is why competitive realms so often result in better results than those with a single, governmental/monopolistic owner: there are creative ways to re-slice a problem that never occur to a committee, or politically-sclerotic bureaucracy/legislature, or a comfortable incumbent. But a smaller entity -- individual or corporate team -- facing more directly the upside/downside of their decisions, can innovate. (Taking your enclosure question at face value: most fans of strong property rights and marketizing-almost-everything still believe in various kinds of common-law carve outs. You can trespass to rescue someone in distress; a tradition of allowed use creates an implied right-of-way/easement for continued use; etc. So you're no more likely to be 'encircled' by sustenance-denying monopolists in the extreme-market solution, than you are in a system where government zoning, eminent-domain, and redevelopment sometimes does the same thing to the politically-weak. Both have some corner-case risk, both have traditional checks. Which converges on useful arrangements more quickly, more often should be the question... rather than concocted extreme cases.)