From: rcp27@nospam.ac.uk
On 2015-03-21 17:23:19 +0000, Adam H. Kerman said:
> bob wrote:
>> On 2015-03-21 13:51:50 +0000, Adam H. Kerman said:
>>> bob wrote:
>
>>>> Considering that things like compulsory purchase powers over land are a
>>>> form of subsidy (because the buyer of that land is forcing the owner to
>>>> sell it at less than they would otherwise chose to sell it at), I would
>>>> extend that to any transportation infrastructure of any kind.
>
>>>> Transportation infrastructure is the classic case of the economic
>>>> benefits being almost entirely external to the owner of the
>>>> infrastructure. In cases like this, it is pretty much universally
>>>> recognised that government provision (or interference in the market to
>>>> bring about the required objective) is beneficial to all.
>
>>> Dude, you have a logic gap there:
>
>>> You lept from "benefits are external", which is correct, to "beneficial
>>> to all", which is false.
>
>> In the general case it is false, but in the specific case of
>> transportation infrastructure it is true. There is not a single person
>> alive in the developed world today who does not have a better quality
>> of life than they would if there were no transportation infrastructure.
>> Something as simple as being able to buy a whole week's worth of
>> groceries in one place, for an afordable cost, and bring them home
>> would be impossible without transportation infrastructure.
>
> There are plenty of people alive who don't benefit from transportation
> infrastructure, say paraplegics traumatically injured in crashes
> in highway traffic, or pedestrians who find life dangerous and
> inconvenient because of highway traffic.
I would think the survivors of major traumatic injury are some of the
people who have gained the most from good transportation
infrastructure. If they did not receive medical attention quickly, and
have access to high quality hospital facilities, it is highly likely
they would have died. Ambulances can't drive quickly on dirt roads.
> Of course benefit from transportation is widespread, but you can't even hint
> that benefits are equally distributed, because that's wrong.
I don't claim the benefits are equally felt, but they are universally
felt: there is nobody who has not benefited from transportation
infrastructure to some extent.
>>> What would be universally beneficial to all would be if there was a
>>> strict relationship between costs and benefits, so that those with a
>>> proportionate benefit pay a proportionate share of costs; a bit of
>>> hedging as it's difficult to avoid outside subsidy whenever government
>>> has its hand in anything.
>
>> It would be lovely if the word were simple enough that every benefit
>> every person gains could be assigned a dollar value, and these could be
>> neatly attributed to specific bits of government spending.
>
> Yeah, but it's not necessary. Change in land value is so easy to measure,
> so taxing land value is close enough to pay for government, especially
> transportation infrastructure.
Change in land value offers one method of evaluating the benefit, but
it is a fairly blunt instrument. For a start, it is hard to establish
the value of land when it is not sold. If I bought a house 20 years
ago and still lived in it today, with no great desire to move, how do
you actually establish the value of that house?
>> Unfortunately the world doesn't work like that. There are an awful lot
>> of things where I benefit from something existing that I don't use. I
>> benefit from the military existing. I hope the military never has to
>> be used, and in some ways it won't need to be used *because* it exists.
>> How much is that benefit worth? I benefit from the fact that it is
>> economically viable for a car company to make a car that I can afford.
>> I don't own a car right now, but nevertheless I benefit from that. I
>> benefit from the education system. I finished school years ago and
>> have no kids, but I still benefit from the education system because it
>> means the other people I depend on in society are better educated. . . .
>
> If you own a house, if your local schools are excellent, it means that
> you can sell your house for more money to a family with school-age
> children. That's actually a direct benefit to you, despite not
> being in school or having children attending that school.
And if I don't own a house, or own a house in an area with poor
schools, I still benefit from living in an educated society. If you
tie taxation to land value, some other guy who owns the expensive house
takes the tax hit, and I get the benefit.
> And it's for the reason that you stated, that there's a value to society
> that its citizens are better educated.
>
>>> With government, most of the time, there's no direct relationship between
>>> taxation and benefit, which is exactly what prevents government "good"
>>> being universally beneficial and can distort the economy.
>
>> The relationship between taxation and benefit is evaluated through the
>> ballot box.
>
> Hardly. Almost never. Voters can be pretty stupid sometimes.
As Winston Churchill put it, "Many forms of Government have been tried
and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that
democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that
democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms
that have been tried from time to time."
>> People offer a proposal for what they thing we should do and what it
>> will cost us, and we decide whether to support that proposal or not.
>
> Well, I'd like to do a lot more referendums for major spending, yes.
Ah well, you see, I happen to live in Switzerland where we have not
only possibly the best railways in the world, but certainly the most
referendum-heavy system going. Interestingly when the present Swiss
constitution was enacted in 1847 it was modelled on the US one.
Somehow things have diverged in the intervening years.
Robin
--- SoupGate/W32 v1.03
* Origin: LiveWire BBS -=*=- UseNet FTN Gateway (1:2320/1)
|
