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You aren't even capturing the tiniest fraction of the scale. For one, it's not just street parking... it's the roads/streets themselves. Roads and highways hav
by NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
You aren't even capturing the tiniest fraction of the scale. For one, it's not just street parking... it's the roads/streets themselves.
Roads and highways have been a multi-trillion-dollar subsidy for Ford, GM, and Chrysler since the 1920s. It's bizarre how blind everyone is to that.
- narcindin 4y agoIn defense of Ford, GM and Chrysler; it is also a subsidy to BMW, Toyota and Tesla.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 4y agoSure, today. They weren't around for the larger part of that time period though, at least not on this continent.
- jMyles 4y agoOh of course. Of course! I'm always amazed when someone thinks they've trumped anarchist political science by asking, "by who will pave the roads?!" Scaling back road pavement is one of the things to which I most look forward in the retracting state apparatus.
- Finnucane 4y agoPlease leave a 4-ft-wide path for bikes though.
- readthenotes1 4y agoWell, and the people who use cars...
- jjk166 4y agoInfrastructure is a subsidy for everyone. With roads you can build a building anywhere and get stuff delivered to it, you can get customers from a wide area to come to your location, you can access a variety of suppliers, you can hire workers from a wide area, you can live anywhere and still get things like emergency services. It's a subsidy for construction, it's a subsidy for retail, its a subsidy for manufacturing, it's a subsidy for agriculture. We were building roads for millenia before the invention of the car, and for good reason. That's the whole point of infrastructure - it helps everyone, often indirectly, and thus it makes sense to share the burden of its construction and maintenance.
- Tiktaalik 4y agoif it was one lane it would be a reasonable public good for everyone, as public transit and delivery doesn't use that much, but it's a lot more than that. The reason we have 8 lane highways etc is because of private automobile use, and the enormous space inefficiency of automobiles, of private vehicles being driven back and forth with single travellers in them. We've gone too deep into fundamentally inefficient private automobile use and are having to spend a fortune on the infrastructure to keep that paradigm functional.
- jjk166 4y agoExcept there are tons of people who derive massive benefits from private vehicles that can be driven between arbitrary locations at arbitrary times by single travelers. And for the most part it is single lane roads - no one is building an 8 lane superhighway to a farmhouse. You only see such large infrastructure near hubs where all those smaller roads are coming together. Yeah, maybe the people who live and work within a city don't benefit much from the infrastructure directly, but the people who commute to or from it do.
- jMyles 4y agoScreaming truth into the void. The only explanation for the downvotes and asinine arguments against what you're saying throughout this thread is denial.
- josephcsible 4y agoDidn't roads exist for millennia before cars did? Were they a subsidy for nothing and basically just burning money before?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 4y agoI could take a picture of some roads around me if you like, and you can compare them to the goat path that existed between any two ancient cities that you like. I think I remember reading that when the Matrix sequel came out, they spent something like $10 million building a 1-mile length of highway. I assume that this was neither much cheaper nor much more expensive than building the real would have been. Which fallacy is it when you make a false equivalence between some gigantic construction product in the modern world, and someone having cleared some brush in the pre-modern world, all because we happen to use the same word to label both things?