@ dexter morgan
If a company causes somebody’s death, it is perfectly right that they should have their rear end sued off them, which makes damn sure that companies be more careful. The courts are indeed an important part of the market. This is not, however regulation.
Alternatively, they could make it quite clear what the risk to work for them is in their contracts, and then the workers can decide whether or not they take the risk. In this case, they would have to pay the workers ‘danger money’, again making an incentive to take a reasonable amount of risk.

As regards the Pinto, the plastic block would have cost $13, installing it would have saved about 200 lives a year, and Ford estimated that each life lost would cost $200,000, and so with the predicted car sales, it wasn’t worth it to install the block. Now, you can argue that the number $200,000 was too low, or even too high, but the principle, that there is a price worth paying, cannot be questioned. You cannot maintain that an infinite value should be placed on a human life, because then you will require that every single piece of resources should be allocated to extending life.

@nola2172
If a road is genuinely beneficial then it should be possible to pay people to get the land to build it etc.

More importantly, though, there is no moral mandate to take someone’s land and build on it just because what you are building is a road.

“For agriculture, if you increased the cost of locally grown food by making them pay for their own roads, you would essentially destroy the domestic agriculture industry because imported food (which would be grown in countries in which the government pays for the roads) would be cheaper. I don't see that being a great idea.”

You mean we’d all get to free ride on the road building of foreign countries, without needing to invest anywhere near as heavily in infrastructure ourselves? Really, that would be fantastic!

To paraphrase Friedman, when someone complains about unfair competition, it is always a request for special privilege.

“1. Britain now has the highest rail fares in Europe, and on average rail fares in the UK are 50% higher than in the rest of Europe. (Source: PassengerFocus survey, February 2009) Isn't privatisation supposed to lead to lower prices thanks to the wonders of competition?”

Yeah, but then again a lot of maintenance has been necessary because it wasn’t done properly under British Rail, so of course prices are going to go up.

Also, as is to be expected, as people got wealthier, they started to use the trains less (a trend that started before privatisation) and so efficiencies of scale were inevitably lost.

“2. In the 30 years before privatisation, there was only one fatal accident on Britain's railways. In the five years following privatisation, there were 5 fatal accidents.”
This is factually incorrect. British Rail was nationalised after ‘93
In ’67
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hither_Green_rail_crash
In ‘88
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapham_Junction_rail_crash
In ‘78
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taunton_train_fire
In ‘73
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ealing_rail_crash
In ’67
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stechford_rail_crash
In ‘86
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockington_rail_crash
In ‘79
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisley_Gilmour_Street_rail_accident
In ‘67
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirsk_rail_crash_(1967)
In ‘72
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltham_Well_Hall_rail_crash
In ‘75
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuneaton_rail_crash

I could go on.... If you want?

“3. Most damning of all is the cost to the taxpayer. We are now paying THREE TIMES more in subsidies to the private rail companies, in real terms, than we did to operate British Rail under public ownership. If that doesn't represent a dramatic failure, I don't know what does.”

Stop paying the effing subsidies! Simples. Subsidies stop market forces from working, and so are actively harmful.

“What libertarians seem to forget in their love of self-interest and the greed is good ideal is that that is exactly why government exists. ...because it is in our self-interest.”

Libertarianism is not equivalent to Objectivism.

Anyway, your error here is to grant primacy to selfishness, rather than the property right. We oppose government because the first principle is the property right. Then the second is selfishness.