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If you are going to pay for something, you want to pay for it in money if at all possible. Social problems arise when you pay for your spot on the road with you

If you are going to pay for something, you want to pay for it in money if at all possible. Social problems arise when you pay for your spot on the road with your willingness to sit in traffic instead of a congestion fee. When you pay journalists in attention instead of cash. When you pay politicians in power instead of cash. I think that in the case of journalism the problem is the hardest. I disagree with the author that the problem can just be solved by people doing local journalism. That pays less in both money and attention. The bottom line is that good journalism is a public good in an extremely strong sense, and is very unlikely to be provided by the market. But obviously the government employing an army of journalists is not any kind of solution either. Whereas we could much more easily implement congestion pricing, or pay politicians more money.

zozbot234 5y ago
Let people crowdfund good-quality journalism/blogging/policy work. Patreon and GoFundMe are good first starts at the problem, but of course their political bias is highly problematic. If anything, it is all the more urgent to fund high-quality work on the other side of the political spectrum - surely they deserve way better than their current focus on Trumpism and anti-vaxx protests!
Jiro 5y ago
>Social problems arise when you pay for your spot on the road with your willingness to sit in traffic instead of a congestion fee. On the other hand, it's a lot easier for a bureaucrat to siphon off a congestion fee to fill his own pockets or his friends' pockets, than it is to fill his pockets with "willingness to sit in traffic".