Back to the specific OP example, that pricing structure does create an especially steep opportunity cost situation for those who cannot pony up for the multiyear renewal up front.
For comparison, my current state of residence’s DL is renewed on an 8 yr basis for $32US (48.33AUD as of date of post). Again: 8 years for 32 bucks, $4 American ($6 Australian) per year. Their one-year rate is fourteen times ours and no way the cost of doing things (or the average personal income) is 14X.
Where’s Mad Max when you need him…
Though what is operative in this situation is the definition per a jurisdiction’s statute and case law, of a right, not necessarily a coloquial “general definition”. And not every need creates a positive right.
One can drive unrestrictedly… within your private property on rolling surfaces that are not part of the public road network. What the state issues is a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roads, having tested that you can do so safely.
Legally the right being infringed in wolfpup’s example is not the right to drive but the right to not be deprived of something already lawfully acquired without cause or a due process.
That’s not a technical legal claim, it’s an ethical one. It’s someone using their assertion that this is not ethically a right to justify denying it to those who can’t afford to pay.
( And the technical legal basis for @wolfpup’s response to my hypothetical is a red herring. Unless you grant that you feel you have an ethical right to drive, why would you pursue any legal recourse in the first place? You should have no objection to your license being arbitrarily refused or revoked. )
In my state I can get vehicle registration for one or two years. The two year registration is exactly double a one year registration. However, if anything happens to your car in the first year - stolen, totaled, or sold/traded-in - you don’t get anything back for the second year you prepaid. It’s a scam in that I have a potential downside but no upside to prepaying. At $44, the present value of money doesn’t really apply to the consumer as it would most likely be literally pennies, but if enough people statewide do it, the state earns extra interest.
Unless you live in a big city with good public transit. It’s not necessary in NYC, Boston, Philly or other cities with reliable public transit.
True enough. But that only strengthen’s the case for taxing privately owned vehicles rather than taxing via a driver’s license fee. A poor family may decide that they can get by without a car for everyday use, but should not then be obliged by the high price to forego the right to drive occasionally - when renting a car on vacation, for example.
For the same reason that I might pursue legal recourse if the government seized and confiscated my electric can opener. Because, to repeat, in a democracy the government cannot act arbitrarily, and citizens are entitled to due process including appeals, irrespective of any “rights” surrounding the issue in dispute. Talk about red herrings – the red herring here is your claim that unless something is an absolute enumerated right, the government can act with impunity and the citizen has no grounds for complaint.
The fact that driver’s licenses are very common has absolutely no bearing on the fact that it must be earned and the person must have both the skills and the medical qualifications to hold it. It’s no different than either a private or commercial pilot license.
Perhaps you’d like to argue that that’s a God-given right, too, but few people would make that argument. And yet, contrary to your hypothesis, people who have been denied some category of pilot license on (for example) medical grounds can and do appeal such decisions, not because they’re under any illusion that the license is any kind of :“right”, but because the right in question is the right to fair treatment under the law and the right of a citizen to challenge government decisions that they disagree with. In Canada, there’s a specific federal agency for appealing such decisions with respect to aviation, rail, and marine certifications despite your claim that “You should have no objection to your license being arbitrarily refused or revoked”. In Canada, for instance, the Transportation Appeal Tribunal of Canada exists “to provide for an independent process of review of administrative and enforcement actions – including the suspension, cancellation, refusal to renew, or the refusal to issue or amend documents of entitlement … – taken under various federal transportation Acts” (emphasis mine).
I agree that in general payment structures of this kind defintely impacts poorer people more. The same is true of “pre payment” electricity meters, buying your power bit by bit rather than setting up a direct debit means you never get the the best rate and that is a big issue in the UK at the moment.
I guess I’m more surprised at having to pay a yearly cost to renew your driving license. I’d never heard of that. In the UK you take your test, get your license, and that’s it. The date on mine is good for up to the age of 70.
I got mine changed to reflect address changes but that was free I think, as are any post-70 renewals.
I think there is a huge difference between a business charging for a service, and a tax. A “driver’s license fee” is a tax. Can you 8magine if there was a substantial discount for paying your property taxes five years at a time? Even if it did create practical savings in administrative fees, people would recognize that it was alao a way to have different tax rates for the rich and poor.
Of course - because just like you have the ethical right to drive in our society, you have the ethical right to own things and not have them arbitrarily seized or stolen by the government. To suggest that this all derives from the right to due process is perverse. A legal “process” must serve some purpose, it is not an end in itself. One avails oneself of due process for redress when some right has been violated.
And you are creating a straw man here by inserting the modifier “God-given”, because otherwise your argument fails. I’ve said quite clearly that the right to drive is not something anyone would sensibly call a fundamental right, one can easily imagine a slightly different society where nobody is allowed to drive because its much safer to let AIs do it. The point is that there is a hierarchy of rights, and plenty of things fit the ethical and function definition of a right that are not fundamental or God-given or explicitly constitutionally protected. Care to respond to the Wikipedia definition that you ignored?
Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles or entitlements; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory.
I think your perspective (which is common among Americans) is another facet of the quasi-religious reverence for the Constitution as a perfect document. If something is in the Constitution its merit cannot be challenged; and if something is not explicitly in the Constitution it doesn’t matter. Americans seem to want to use the word “right” to be essentially synonymous with the much narrower “Constitutional right”.
Which would be fine if it were just semantics. But it’s not. This discussion arose because someone used the “driving is not a right” trope to justify a high and exclusive driver’s license fee as a mechanism for regressive taxation, and something that thus may exclude poorer people from driving at all.
To me this seems, well, far from obvious. What qualifies something as a tax? Is any fee or charge paid to any governmental agency for any reason a tax? If not, what are the criteria?
But that something may be an “ethical” right does not automatically make it into a legal positive right. In the end yes, “ethical” rights do exist and may be claimed, but in a legal structure get to be defended through the arguing that you are being deprived of something the law does protect - equal treatment under law, opportunities, fruits of labor, intangible property, etc. So in the end a law that arbitrarily deprives people of their driving licenses or makes it unduly onerous to have oneis unjust, though not because of the driving in itself but because it hinders what has become a need to exercise many other rights.
The entire point I have been making is that we have ethical rights that are important, yet not so fundamental that they have explicit legal protection.
Again, this is a perverse way of thinking about it, confusing the mechanism of redress with the reason for seeking redress. If driving itself didn’t matter, if driving is not something that we agree ethically everyone should have an equal right to do in our society, then the concept of due process for redress is irrelevant. There is nothing to remedy. A poster explicitly claimed that high driver’s licence fees that exclude poor people is not a problem, based on the poorly-conceived trope that driving is a “privilege” rather than a right.
I feel like a fee is for a specific service that you can opt out of. Like when I pay to go to my community pool, that’s a fee. It supports the pool. A tax is a way a government raises revenue. Charging nearly a hundred dollars a year to drive is a tax.
No, the reason the rich are so rich is that they own the factory that makes the boots, not because they can save a few dollars buying higher quality boots.
I always find it annoying when people imply that rich people get rich because they are better at saving money. No one “saves” their way to wealth (I mean unless you want to wait a lifetime for those pinched pennies to earn compound interest). They are rich because they make more money.
Most things are going to seem “unfair” for poorer folk because poor people have less money to spend so are less desirable as customers. There is a certain irony in that people start offering you a lot of free shit once you are actually able to afford it!
And obviously nobody wants to lend you money unless you don’t need it.
But we come back to @Exapno_Mapcase’s post early on. Obviously people went through this thought process about the unfairness of capitalism, and invented communism. And unfortunately the evidence seems to be that capitalism is like democracy - the worst system except for all the other ones.
I think the only likely “way out” will be as wealth increases and we move toward something like UBI. And ultimately perhaps capitalism dies in a post-scarcity society when motivations other than material well being will dominate.
You can opt out of having a driver’s license - in some places, many people do and in some places few do. You can opt out of getting a state- issued photo ID as well - if you need a government issued photo ID at all, a passport card costs $65 for a first time application and $30 for renewals and is good for 10 years. I think charging nearly $100 a year is an excessive fee but I think $100 a year to use the community pool would be excessive as well, but that wouldn’t change it into a tax.
There is the question of unfairness of opportunity vs unfairness of outcomes. Communism doesn’t work as advertised because it doesn’t reward innovation or hard work. Capitalism rewards hard work but tends to create a “winner take all” environment which can be just as demotivating.
One of the challenges of being poor (I imagine) is that you don’t have access to the tools and networks that can position you to increase your wealth. If you are working multiple minimum jobs living paycheck to paycheck making ends meet, you don’t really have the time to take classes or train for a new job. And that’s before you even get into circumstances like unplanned pregnancy, drug or alcohol abuse, illness, and so on that exacerbate the issue.
OTOH, of someone wants to spend their entire life working and building companies, why should the system stop them or punish that?
This was back in 2016, before my Medicare kicked in, but one dark night I was loading my car for an early morning departure and had a near catastrophic fall requiring a trip to the emergency room. Between the ER fees, x-rays, stitches an orthopedic consult and a walking cast the six hour trip o the ER ended up costing around $3,000. A week later the hospital called with an offer, if i paid in full before 30 days passed they"d give me a 20% discount, so because I could reach in my pocket and pull out $2,400 I saved $600.
It seems unfair, you know the hospital raises their prices to cover the fast pay discounts, they’ve got to pay their bills, and at least on paper they’re a non-profit, but I sure jumped on the opportunity to save the $600.
It looks to me like you’re mixing up several things here, and I’m trying to understand (a) what you mean and (b) whether it makes sense (though other people are welcome to weigh in too).
First you seem to be saying that not being able to opt out of something is what makes it a tax rather than a fee? You can opt out of paying a driver’s license fee: just don’t drive. Of course, many people “need” to be able to drive. But is this essentially different than other things that some people need to be able to do, that they pay a fee for? Is the fee to obtain a commercial driver’s license to drive a truck a tax, because truckers can’t opt out and still be able to do their job? Is the cost of a bus pass a tax, because some people rely on the municipal bus system to get around? Is the fee for a marriage license a tax?
Or is the distinction that a tax is to “raise revenue” while a fee is to directly support the specific thing that the fee is for? In that case, wouldn’t we have to know what our, or @kambuckta’s, driver’s license fee money is being used for, to decide whether or not it counts as a tax?
Or is it the amount of money charged that distinguishes between a tax and a fee? You say “Charging nearly a hundred dollars a year to drive is a tax,” as if some lesser amount would not be a tax. Is this because you are assuming that nearly a hundred dollars a year is more than would be required to directly support the costs of driving, so that this is really just the previous point about “raising revenue” vs “support”? If you’re objecting to the amount, it sounds like you’re agreeing with my point that you originally replied to, that any unfairness lies with the amount charged for the yearly license and not with the discount for paying several years at a time.