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> This isn’t just about semantics It really is. What people mean is "it's for the public good". Write it like that and the premise for the article is gone. ED
by ot 4y ago
> This isn’t just about semantics
It really is. What people mean is "it's for the public good". Write it like that and the premise for the article is gone.
EDIT: I want to add that this looks to me like a fallacy that is very common in mathematical circles: appropriate a term that is in common use, give it a formal definition that works for your theory, and then go back to the public and tell them they're using the term wrong.
- gwd 4y agoI agree that's often a normal problem, but in this case it may be that the author perceives the other side as mixing the two definitions, perhaps on purpose. Because "public goods", in econ-speak, are things which basically have to be paid by taxes. To say that public transit is a "public good" in econ-speak is to say that it is in the same class of things as armies and police and law courts -- things which, by their nature, can never be supportable as a private enterprise. And, as I explain in another comment [1], I think that transit actually is a "public good" in econ-speak: Not the transit itself for the individual traveller, but the availability of good transit for businesses and communities. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35372130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35372130