Ted Cruz is the lizard, though. I can tell, not from his lack of body language cues, but simply because his human-skin suit is so ill-fitting. Also, as a cold-blooded creature, he leaves for warmer places (like Cancun) when Texas gets too cold.
Local buses are a public service run by a municipality or transit authority, generally, but are still a private good. They’re rivalrous (only one butt per seat), and excludable (can’t ride if you don’t pay). This is clearer with inter-city buses, which are operated by private corporations.
Fair. I’m advocating removing all subsidies for private motor vehicles, so that we have a user-pays system, including the cost of negative externalities, like pollution, carbon emissions, and human health impacts, through taxes and registration fees (or similar). This would price the true cost of transportion into goods and services, which would lead to an economically optimal amount of driving. Undoubtedly we’d choose to drive much less, which would have lots of knock-on benefits for individuals and local communities.
Hahahaha, ambulance trains! I would predict that ambulances would cost a bit more due to higher fuel and registration costs, but I’d come out ahead because an ambulance ride is rare, compared to the income and property taxes that I pay every year. Especially since the overwhelmingly-likely way that I might break my leg is getting hit by a car. (They’d also have better response times with fewer cars on the streets.)
So we’ve agreed that private cars are a net loss to society, i.e. they cost more to operate than drivers receive in benefits. (This conclusion must follow from the idea that a user-pays system is untenable, rather than either a wash or a benefit to drivers.) We can bear that as a society, even if it’s grossly unfair, as long as the economic good times last. But the good times aren’t lasting; lots of communities are structurally bankrupt due to infrastructure obligations, primarily due to accommodating motor vehicles.
Walking and biking require no subsidies, by the way. One might argue that bike lanes are a subsidy, but they aren’t needed on streets with fewer, slower cars. Bike lanes are motor vehicle infrastructure.
That’s more than prolly fine, it is fine. If you can afford to pay the true cost of driving to enable that choice of location, I’ll not mind. But what is the net benefit to society to subsidize that choice? It reminds me of the joke about losing money on each sale, but making it up on volume.
Yes, and? All of those public services rely on private goods to operate, e.g. vehicles, fuel, wages, et cetera. All of those are rolled in to the cost of providing the service, so there’s no reason that use of the basic vehicle infrastructure could not also be included. It would help eliminate deadweight loss, in fact.
If it’s not nonsense, then let’s examine the logic underlying your comment: A user-pays funding model for automobile infrastructure, with all costs internalized, means that there would no longer be any motor vehicles, and thus no ambulances. So, the implication is that driving is so costly that nobody would do it if they actually had to pay for it themselves.
I love these nonsensical replies. They’re very validating.
This is also a poor take. “Benefit” is not a binary state. What if we treated, say, water the same way? That is, you pay the local water utility a connection fee, and the water is free. There’d be no penalty, no incentive not to have a waterfall feature in your front yard fed by the tap. What would happen to water usage?
The same thing that happens with “free” use of roads and streets—the tragedy of the commons. They fill to overcapacity daily.
Ah, but facilities used to drive a car are private goods, in that they are rivalrous and potentially excludable. Only one car can occupy a given space at a time, and we can (and do) charge for their use. Education, on the other hand, is a public good, non-rivalrous and non-exclusive. They are not the same, and there are good reasons to fund one with tax money, and not the other.
It’s economically inefficient. The true cost of transport should be naturally priced into the good or service, rather than artificially externalized. Supply-side subsidy by the government like this leads to higher-than-optimal use, which is the definition of deadweight loss. It costs us more to do things this way.
And, in this case, it’s not just taxpayers and consumers paying too much, there are catastrophic climate, social, environmental, and health effects from overuse of automobiles. If anything, government policy should work to eliminate these negative externalities by making drivers pay those costs, instead of imposing them on everybody else.
Saying “things you use go by car, neener neener” may sound profound, if you don’t examine the notion critically. It’s really just a thought-terminating cliché, though.
Earning money from having money flies in the face of OC’s implication that being a billionaire is the result of virtuous effort. And, it sounds like a major flaw in the system all by itself.
But, even though they could passively rake in the income, so many billionaires actively try to increase their wealth, for no particular apparent purpose, and at the expense of harm to others, which does seem pathological.
Oh, sweet summer child…
Mental disorder is very, very tricky to define, as something maladaptive in one context may work in another. One example is how in individualistic cultures, people hearing voices more often experience them as intrusive and malevolant, and we call it schizophrenia, while people on collectivist cultures may experience the voices as friendly and comforting. Is that a disease, then, if it benefits a person? Psychologists tend to go with a working definition based on how adaptive a condition is for the person and their society.
But in what context does it benefit a person to be unable to ever have “enough” of anything, never able to be satiated, compulsively adding to an enormous pile of wealth far, far beyond anything that they could ever use? Further, when the condition drives them to use the power attendant to that wealth to actively harm their society in myriad ways, how is that adaptive? It seems that they harbor a deep anxiety about the possibility that their accumulated wealth might be reduced, in a way completely imperceptible to them, and even being consciously aware that this is so, still suffer from a mania that compels them to hurt other people to keep that from happening.
Hardly sounds like what most of us would define as “successful in life.”
(CW: black humor)
✅ always in the car ✅ poor diet ✅ unable to walk
What’s the issue? Sounds like any American kid in the sunurbs.
Oh, wow, there’s a deep cut! Love it.
U.S. government policy has not even closely reflected the will of the people since 1980, at the latest. Instead, the Overton Window kept moving right, and ever-more neoliberal, until we got to a point at which our only choices were between a grifter with populist energy, and a candidate offering a clearance-bin version of the “HOPE” that turned out to be more neoliberal ratfucking back when an effective salesman had pitched it to us.
And, no surprise, tons of people checked out of a political process which offered no meaningful response to their day-to-day life of getting economically ratfucked, because it just drained their energy for no discernable benefit.
So… you asked.
Our demented puppet President has powerful people propping him up. Would be mighty helpful if Germans did something about Thiel, and South Africans did something about Musk. Australians, you good with handling Murdoch? Okay, let’s go.
“You’re fighting back against out aggression? Hey, no fair!”
Best that I can do is, “non-figuratively.” As in, “The power of the hurricane winds non-figuratively blew me away.”