People who did not witness how dangerous such schemes are, will probably not understand until they live through it. It's a popular scheme (heck, even wealthy so

People who did not witness how dangerous such schemes are, will probably not understand until they live through it. It's a popular scheme (heck, even wealthy software dev in HN like it) and very easy to pass, democratically speaking. Price voting is the difference between communist and capitalist societies. If you offer free public transportation, you kill any potential initiative to create alternate transportation and even can hurt individual transport; making the state a de-facto monopoly over transporting people. The natural evolution of such bureaucratic systems, is that they'll target something else next time (free healthcare, free books, free whatever...) as it expands their sphere of power and influence further. Soon, you have a huge bureaucracy that controls large parts of your economy which is impossible to change since the leaders of such bureaucracy are now running the country. They are also demanding higher pay, more benefits, and less working time. Your economy stagnates, the service gets worse as there is no competition, tax revenue is down and a large deficit/debt starts growing; and it's only a matter of time before the whole system collapses. Sounds familiar?