Then don’t operate out of ignorance.
Of course. Individualism makes people weak. Collectivism makes them strong. Freedom is slavery. War is peace. etc. etc.
What is it that folks with your particular political persuasion and their proclivity to paint their opponents as children?
We know what all levels of government spend on roads, but that bill is divided from revenue from many different sources. How much one person may contribute is completely irrelevant to anyone, because roads are a common good that benefit individuals who may have never even been in a car before.
Talk about double-talk: you want to say that taking away people’s ability to drive down a public road without interference from government- or corporate-owned toll booths is “freedom?” That’s just laughable. Would the Old West have been more free if the railroad and oil companies had been able to put fences up every two miles and charged cowboys a fee to get through the gate? Cowboys woulda had more choices, whether to pay their fees to Standard Oil or the Union Pacific – would they have been more free if they had restrictions on their movement?
Toll booths never made any sense to me anyway. If you need money to fund highways, just add a few cents to the gasoline sales tax, revenue from which is always directly proportional to the wear and tear on the roads; collection mechanisms are already in place for that, and an increase does not require hiring any additional personnel.
It is freedom when you choose what you spend your money on and how you spend it. It is the opposite of freedom when someone takes that money from you and decides how to spend it on what he thinks is good for you. I know it is a hard concept to understand, as witnessed by so many people pining for the big daddy government.
Not when we actually get to elect the people making those decisions. Then it becomes freedom again.
The advantage of centralizing and distributing (socialism!) is that it smooths out the differences between poor areas and rich areas. Otherwise, you will have quality of roads (bridges, drains, etc.) highly correlated to local wealth levels. The rich drive on broad, smooth highways, and the poor get rutted, clogged, narrow roads.
The U.S. has tried it both ways, and many (most?) of us prefer the “levelling” approach of FDR and LBJ, rather than the “trickle down” approach of RWS and JWB.
What would happen if, somehow, beer was suddenly and deliberately free?
I’m not looking for a lot of “who would pay for the beer” responses.
Sure. And freedom is slavery, war is peace, etc. etc. etc.
Well, let’s assume rents are not controlled. Can a landlord hike rents enough to cover his significantly increased tax bill? Will this drive out many tenants who can no longer afford to live there? For that matter, is the money the tenants used to pay in income taxes all going to go toward paying property taxes? If so, what was the point?
You don’t have that choice without a government to to the footwork for you. Despite the ego-fantasies of libertarians, individuals don’t have the capability to duplicate the work of entire government agencies. And without public education most of the population would be illiterate anyway.
:rolleyes: Numbers and organization are always stronger and more capable than the individual. The people indulging in “war is peace” style bad reasoning are the libertarians. “Freedom is slavery” might as well be their motto, since they tirelessly work to destroy freedom in the name of creating it. A better term for libertarianism/Randism would be “neofeudalism”, since their real goal (or at least the real results of what they say they want) would be a world of lords and serfs. They of course are all absolutely certain that they’ll get to be one of the lords.
Egotism is at the core of this particular political fantasy. It’s all about how “I don’t need the government, because I’m better than that. I’m too smart to be fooled and too tough to be hurt. Only weaklings and losers need the govenrment.”
As opposed to your desire to set up the wealthy and corporations as our overlords. Somehow it’s not oppression when it’s done for a profit.
Again, it is the opposite of freedom to literally create barriers (the kind with swinging arms) to driving on roads. It is totally absurd to argue otherwise. This is all the more true because people will ultimately have unequal access to roads, depending on how rich they are.
Let me ask you a serious question: I want to become a sidewalk magnate. I want to start buying sidewalks everywhere, and once I start buying, I’m sure others will understand the market for sidewalks. I buy the sidewalk on your street, and intend to charge you 25 cents every time you want to cross the sidewalk. My friend Cecil buys he sidewalk on the other side of your block, but to get to it, you have to go through your back door, jump your neighbor’s fence, circle his house and then you can use Cecil’s sidewalk for 15 cents.
Are you now more free now that you have to pay me or Cecil every time you need to take your doggie for a walk?
How about you make an argument that doesn’t conclude with annoying condescension?
If it happened overnight it would be devastating, practically of course it is an impossibility that it could happen overnight.
Government needs X portion of society as a whole’s income each year to survive. If we had a situation where we were forced to phase out the Federal income tax other taxes would be levied which would generate the same revenue.
You can get the same portion of society’s income each year from other types of taxes, but the rates would be a lot different from what we see now. The way in which you drain the blood can have different effects on the economy. Income is one of the better ways to do it just because it is automatic, difficult to avoid, and consistent. But there are technically other ways the government could fill its coffers.
It’s my understanding that tolls are typically to pay off specific projects, i.e. pay a toll before going on this road or bridge, to help defray the costs of its construction. A few decades back, one of Montreal’s bridges had a toll (and traffic reporters still refer to the “toll plaza” where the booths used to be). The most recently-built bridge also has a toll, but modern tech has eliminated the need for booths - a digital picture is snapped of your license plate and you get billed by mail.
Either A) switching to a broad-based consumption tax would be a net neutral change, up to radical social reorganization, or B) you are specifically choosing a course of action which would increase the deleterious effects of taxation. If (A), well, we already have that choice in choosing less income to avoid taxes, which necessarily means less consumption, so why change at all? If (B), well, good luck with your economy.
Freedom is not synonymous with “free”, as in no charge.
My sidewalk belongs to me. If I sold it to you knowing that you will charge me to use it, I’d say that’s my fault. Also, if your locality allows that in its zoning and easement laws, you chose the wrong place to live.
I’m usually all for less government, but this libertarian toll roads everywhere idea is absurd. How much of a truly free market would there be? Say the government sold the roads to private corporations and allowed others to build competing roads.
Does anyone really think that we would have 5 different freeway-type roads between say, New York and Richmond, all with varying perks, different widths, different speed limits and such? How could a competitor offer a superior product when he has to pay millions to start one up? I mean, it’s just a road; I’m not going to pay vastly more for one over the other.
And even if we did, how much better would that make life? So, I save a couple of bucks on the road with potholes and on other days I splurge for one with the wide lanes and the 100mph speed limit. That might make life a little better for me to have that choice, but when I travel into unfamiliar areas, do I need to stop and study a webpage every time I turn onto a new road to decide the right one for me?
I kinda agree with Terr, look at the freedom we lost when the Federal government decided to stick their noses in the whole civil rights thing. How am i supposed to enjoy eating at the lunch counter when there are colored people sitting there? And why in the world didn’t we just let those rural people decide if they wanted to have electricity?
Yep…for-profit fire departments are a patently bad idea. Indeed the inventor of what would become recognizable as a professional fire fighting force is argued to have been the wealthiest man who ever lived in history (debatable but he’s up there on the list at least).
Marcus Licinius Crassus bought lots of slaves. When a fire started somewhere in Rome he would show up with his slave fire brigade and offer to buy the property in the nearby area for a pittance. The people had a choice of losing everything or walking away with at least a little bit of money. If they didn’t pay he’d just watch it all burn down. Once Crassus bought up the property he’d use his slave fire brigade to put out the fire.
It’s a can’t lose business model. If business is slow doubtless it is little trouble to light a match under a few places to drum up business.
I don’t know a lot about how roads are built, or the history of e.g. railroads, but it seems to me that the transaction costs are enormous anywhere where two roads would be better than one and competition would be extremely scarce because of it.
The only way you could save money is if private roads would be so efficient versus the current model that road owners could turn a profit and still maintain the roads (or maintain them better). I don’t dispute the inefficiencies of government but that’s a really tall order.
These additional transaction costs would really suck. But presumably the private-road crowd feels that we consume too much travel—we drive too much. That has its own costs, in terms of traffic we sit in, pollution we create, and so on. Privatizing roads would bring these costs in line somewhat. Of course, so would other measures, since these externalities exist only because driving is mostly a fixed cost, not a marginal cost, for the driver, but for the people the driver pushes costs onto, the costs are marginal, not fixed. Increasing the tax on gasoline considerably would help alleviate this measure without privatization.
almost a no-brainer. a Value-added tax would be instigated…which is being discussed anyhow.