5 ms·

Why are you glad that every road isn't a toll road? You are imagining that would cost you more, I think. But if you pay X dollars of taxes towards the roads eve

by curi 19y ago

Why are you glad that every road isn't a toll road? You are imagining that would cost you more, I think. But if you pay X dollars of taxes towards the roads every year, and otherwise would pay Y dollars in tolls, why assume X<Y? In general the free market does things more cheaply/efficiently -- why wouldn't that be true of roads too? Also, isn't is a bit ridiculous to call government schooling a success? It's failing in a wide variety of practical ways quite apart from any philosophical objection to the government deciding which ideas our kids are supposed to learn.

nostrademons 19y ago
Transaction costs. Toll collectors get paid shitloads of money. You also pay a cost in lost time. If you get paid $50/hour and spend 5 minutes a day stuck at a toll plaza, you're wasting over $4 in time daily, which is often 4 times the monetary cost of the toll. Over a work-year, you'd spend nearly $1400 in lost time while waiting for tolls.
- mhb 19y ago
  Maybe competition between roads would reduce the time spent at tolls. Also, presumably, unmanned toll booths would be used. You may currently be spending more than $1400 to the government to pay for government roads. With competitive incentives in road placement and size, you might save more than enough time to offset the transaction costs.
  - nostrademons 19y ago
    Until the development of electronic transponders, there was a physical limit to how quickly you can collect tolls. It may be somewhat practical now that you have drive-through tollbooths, but there are a bunch of other problems it creates. For example: Roads are a high-fixed-cost-low-variable-cost industry. I posted on these at Reddit - http://reddit.com/info/2fquz/comments/c2fttk http://reddit.com/info/2fquz/comments/c2fttk. Everything that's wrong with airlines will go wrong with roads, and more. I suspect that you'll see massive overinvestment in roads as road companies try to capture market share, then the huge number of intersections (all toll, remember?) will reduce driving efficiency. Free markets solve a lot of things, but they don't solve everything. There's no magic wand that makes them more efficient than a public solution. There are, however, a series of incentives and information-transmission mechanisms that usually give a free-market operator an information advantage over a public operator, hence letting them produce more efficiently. If the incentives point in the wrong direction, though, you get less efficient production.
    - mhb 19y ago
      You seem to be asserting that consumers are not better off with the airlines deregulated. Although I hate air travel and everyone likes to complain about it, I don't think you can argue that, as government has been removed from airline regulation, air travel has become vastly more cheaper and available to more people and that it is possible to reach many more locations by plane. Similarly for another high fixed cost industry which you cite - telecommunications. Free markets might not solve everything, but they're almost always better than the alternatives. As examples of the alternatives, consider the postal service, government-run schools, Medicare and welfare.
      - rms 19y ago
        The governments subsidize airports through enormous amounts of land close to cities at below market rates. Without this intervention, airfare would be much more expensive. Do you think we would be better off if airports would have had to purchase their land on a true free market or is it good for a government to give airports cheap land?
        mhb 19y ago
        It's hard to know. Presumably the system would look different today if the government had not distorted it in that way. Perhaps if market incentives were allowed to operate instead of the land being taken, we would all be flying around in the jet cars we expected.
        rms 19y ago
        I doubt it. Fossil fuel based flying cars are even more unsustainable than our current cars...
        mhb 19y ago
        You sound so sure. You don't think if the enormous amounts of subsidies the government had spent on airports had instead been allowed to flow to alternative transportation modes or energy research, things might be different?
- curi 19y ago
  There don't have to be toll booths. If you think that's a bad idea, why assume it would have to be used? Another option is a monthly subscription fee for unlimited access to all roads a company owns. If there are a small number of large companies this might be convenient. And don't complain about fear of monopoly -- the alternative is a total government monopoly. There are various possible ways the road use for subscribers only might be enforced. Offhand, none sound especially convenient. But they all sound better than the status quo: all people in the area are counted as "subscribers", even if they don't own a car, and are all billed, and this is backed up with guns. That's worse than any of the non-ideal enforcement mechanisms I can imagine. And while it may save a bit on transaction costs, it does that by not even trying to differentiate a subscriber from a non-subscriber.
  - davidw 19y ago
    How do you collect the money if there are no toll booths? Subsidize the private corporation by having police stop people without them? You don't seem to be considering a couple of things: The "backed up by guns" (if you want to have a serious discussion, these sorts of libertarian cliches could perhaps be checked at the door) tax funded roads have benefits that extend beyond the road users. "Externalities" as it were, in terms of lower prices for goods that are easily and quickly shipped to the area, competition for other modes of transportation, and perhaps jobs in sectors like tourism. If, ignoring the externalities, you wish to more directly attach the costs to the people utilizing the roads, you could raise gas taxes. Of course, that has its own positive and negative aspects, and winners and losers. The real world is tremendously complicated, and I don't think it's really possible to predict everything. However, I don't think that means that you can simply ignore some of the more interesting facets of economics and say "errr, just let the market take care of it" - it's just too simplistic.
rms 19y ago
I think a 99% literacy rate shows the success of our schools at providing a certain base level of education. If our poor population had to choose between food, energy, and school the literacy rate would plummet.
- curi 19y ago
  And you don't want people to be able to make their own choices about what to spend their time and money on, or what?
  - rms 19y ago
    No, children should not have to or be able to make a choice about basic education. As nostrademons was saying, democracy begins to fall apart with a completely uneducated populace.
    - curi 19y ago
      Not children, or their parents, I take it. So, how exactly do you draw the line of which ideas should be forced on unwilling families in the name of basic education?
      - rms 19y ago
        You're asking me to describe a curriculum. The curriculum nostrademons proposed sounds great to me. As a start, it's good to force reading and math on unwilling families in the name of basic education.
        mhb 19y ago
        That's great if everyone agrees to put nostrademons in charge. Instead what you get is: "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren." -- The late Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, 1985
davidw 19y ago
You have never spent hours baking in 35C weather waiting in traffic backed up at a tollbooth on the Italian Autostrada. Sometimes traffic is backed up for kilometers and kilometers. The people that own them don't really care that much, because they get their money just the same, and since they have a monopoly, they don't have any real competition unless you take the train or a plane, which simply isn't possible in many cases.

by curi 19y ago

nostrademons 19y ago

Transaction costs. Toll collectors get paid shitloads of money. You also pay a cost in lost time. If you get paid $50/hour and spend 5 minutes a day stuck at a toll plaza, you're wasting over $4 in time daily, which is often 4 times the monetary cost of the toll. Over a work-year, you'd spend nearly $1400 in lost time while waiting for tolls.

mhb 19y ago
Maybe competition between roads would reduce the time spent at tolls. Also, presumably, unmanned toll booths would be used. You may currently be spending more than $1400 to the government to pay for government roads. With competitive incentives in road placement and size, you might save more than enough time to offset the transaction costs.
- nostrademons 19y ago
  Until the development of electronic transponders, there was a physical limit to how quickly you can collect tolls. It may be somewhat practical now that you have drive-through tollbooths, but there are a bunch of other problems it creates. For example: Roads are a high-fixed-cost-low-variable-cost industry. I posted on these at Reddit - http://reddit.com/info/2fquz/comments/c2fttk http://reddit.com/info/2fquz/comments/c2fttk. Everything that's wrong with airlines will go wrong with roads, and more. I suspect that you'll see massive overinvestment in roads as road companies try to capture market share, then the huge number of intersections (all toll, remember?) will reduce driving efficiency. Free markets solve a lot of things, but they don't solve everything. There's no magic wand that makes them more efficient than a public solution. There are, however, a series of incentives and information-transmission mechanisms that usually give a free-market operator an information advantage over a public operator, hence letting them produce more efficiently. If the incentives point in the wrong direction, though, you get less efficient production.
  - mhb 19y ago
    You seem to be asserting that consumers are not better off with the airlines deregulated. Although I hate air travel and everyone likes to complain about it, I don't think you can argue that, as government has been removed from airline regulation, air travel has become vastly more cheaper and available to more people and that it is possible to reach many more locations by plane. Similarly for another high fixed cost industry which you cite - telecommunications. Free markets might not solve everything, but they're almost always better than the alternatives. As examples of the alternatives, consider the postal service, government-run schools, Medicare and welfare.
    - rms 19y ago
      The governments subsidize airports through enormous amounts of land close to cities at below market rates. Without this intervention, airfare would be much more expensive. Do you think we would be better off if airports would have had to purchase their land on a true free market or is it good for a government to give airports cheap land?
      - mhb 19y ago
        It's hard to know. Presumably the system would look different today if the government had not distorted it in that way. Perhaps if market incentives were allowed to operate instead of the land being taken, we would all be flying around in the jet cars we expected.
        rms 19y ago
        I doubt it. Fossil fuel based flying cars are even more unsustainable than our current cars...
        mhb 19y ago
        You sound so sure. You don't think if the enormous amounts of subsidies the government had spent on airports had instead been allowed to flow to alternative transportation modes or energy research, things might be different?
curi 19y ago
There don't have to be toll booths. If you think that's a bad idea, why assume it would have to be used? Another option is a monthly subscription fee for unlimited access to all roads a company owns. If there are a small number of large companies this might be convenient. And don't complain about fear of monopoly -- the alternative is a total government monopoly. There are various possible ways the road use for subscribers only might be enforced. Offhand, none sound especially convenient. But they all sound better than the status quo: all people in the area are counted as "subscribers", even if they don't own a car, and are all billed, and this is backed up with guns. That's worse than any of the non-ideal enforcement mechanisms I can imagine. And while it may save a bit on transaction costs, it does that by not even trying to differentiate a subscriber from a non-subscriber.
- davidw 19y ago
  How do you collect the money if there are no toll booths? Subsidize the private corporation by having police stop people without them? You don't seem to be considering a couple of things: The "backed up by guns" (if you want to have a serious discussion, these sorts of libertarian cliches could perhaps be checked at the door) tax funded roads have benefits that extend beyond the road users. "Externalities" as it were, in terms of lower prices for goods that are easily and quickly shipped to the area, competition for other modes of transportation, and perhaps jobs in sectors like tourism. If, ignoring the externalities, you wish to more directly attach the costs to the people utilizing the roads, you could raise gas taxes. Of course, that has its own positive and negative aspects, and winners and losers. The real world is tremendously complicated, and I don't think it's really possible to predict everything. However, I don't think that means that you can simply ignore some of the more interesting facets of economics and say "errr, just let the market take care of it" - it's just too simplistic.

rms 19y ago

I think a 99% literacy rate shows the success of our schools at providing a certain base level of education. If our poor population had to choose between food, energy, and school the literacy rate would plummet.

curi 19y ago
And you don't want people to be able to make their own choices about what to spend their time and money on, or what?
- rms 19y ago
  No, children should not have to or be able to make a choice about basic education. As nostrademons was saying, democracy begins to fall apart with a completely uneducated populace.
  - curi 19y ago
    Not children, or their parents, I take it. So, how exactly do you draw the line of which ideas should be forced on unwilling families in the name of basic education?
    - rms 19y ago
      You're asking me to describe a curriculum. The curriculum nostrademons proposed sounds great to me. As a start, it's good to force reading and math on unwilling families in the name of basic education.
      - mhb 19y ago
        That's great if everyone agrees to put nostrademons in charge. Instead what you get is: "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren." -- The late Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, 1985

davidw 19y ago

You have never spent hours baking in 35C weather waiting in traffic backed up at a tollbooth on the Italian Autostrada. Sometimes traffic is backed up for kilometers and kilometers. The people that own them don't really care that much, because they get their money just the same, and since they have a monopoly, they don't have any real competition unless you take the train or a plane, which simply isn't possible in many cases.