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Life is regressive. The only way to allocate resources efficiently is to charge what a thing costs to provide. (This often includes a modest accounting profit,
by fennecfoxen 7y ago
Life is regressive. The only way to allocate resources efficiently is to charge what a thing costs to provide. (This often includes a modest accounting profit, consistent with the cost of capital, but never an outsized economic profit, consistent with rent seeking cronyism.)
If life is too hard for people with less money, society should decide how much money to give everyone to make it better, and then let them make their decisions -- instead of declaring, "Passenger Vehicle Traffic And Parking Lots Are Virtuous And Worth Subsidizing."
- chrisseaton 7y agoSounds inefficient and complex to me to give people money just to take it away again. If you don't make people pay tolls you don't need to give them money to pay the tolls. Cover it all with income tax.
- fennecfoxen 7y agoThe problem is that when driving is free, people end up doing much more of it than is efficient. So instead of paying the congestion charge, you "pay" by sitting in traffic. Are you being responsible about resource usage and carpooling? Too bad, you still pay the exact same amount of delay. (HOV lanes do mitigate this, but only on those corridors where they're available.) Meanwhile, the government generally ends up building too many roads and not enough transit. All this easily overwhelms the other inefficiencies. Other bad plans where we don't charge for resources: Let's give all the people free electricity, so poor people don't have to pay something regressive! Then a few jerks can use it to mine Bitcoin until there are brownouts everywhere.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoRoad capacity is a limited resource. You can't just keep increasing income tax indefinitely to keep covering the ever increasing usage. The goal is to reduce usage, and/or time shift it.