You warn me not to claim that taxes are theft by using examples of failed socialist utopias. My argument was that once people have paid their taxes, they deserv

You warn me not to claim that taxes are theft by using examples of failed socialist utopias. My argument was that once people have paid their taxes, they deserve something in return, like the ability to take advantage of the infrastructure that they paid to build. If you simply take peoples money, and use it to subsidize the rich, then that is theft. This is a very different argument than that of Proudhon, who says that "property is theft", or of Thomas Paine who claims that: >Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund prod in this plan is to issue. http://rationalrevolution0.tripod.com/articles/capital_distribution.htm http://rationalrevolution0.tripod.com/articles/capital_distr... Though I agree with both authors in general, my claim of theft was not the same as theirs at all. > The main purpose of public transport is to enable those living in the outskirts to get to the center in the morning, and go back in the evening. The drive to separate out work from living quarters goes back to the industrial revolution when work suddenly became noisy, dangerous and polluting, so the old model (working and living in the same place) had to go. This required mass transport, be it cars or public transport Anyway, there is nothing wrong with living in the outskirts. Many prefer it, especially those with children. In Prague, most people don't work in the center, so the commuting to the center argument is a mute point. The center is literally only for tourists. > Yes, and why is this interesting? The minimum wage in Malawi is ... what $1 per year? The cost of accomodation always correlates strongly with the average income The reason why it is interesting, is that a €50 flight to Brussels, and a €8O AirBnB stay for two nights, would be a third of a months salary at Czech minimum wage. So it is totally unrealistic for people on the east who make that kind of money to travel west. However, westerners have no trouble traveling east. (Some eastern students are able to travel west, but they are among the wealthy). > economies of scale Economies of scale do not exist in the urban housing market, because supply is pretty much fixed. The more demand, the higher the price. I'm not %100 against AirBnB. But I feel that the use of AirBnB to rent out whole apartments is unfair in cities where taxpayers heavily subsidize infrastructure and common spaces. Especially when the investor is a foreign one. Then the money from the west flows east and then flows right back out again.