[ExI] Serfdom and libertarian critiques (Was: Call to Libertarians)

[Damien Sullivan]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 11:17:07PM -0500, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:

> >> > If 10% of my income goes to build a private palace, that's theft. ??If
> >> > 50% of my income goes to zero-fare public transit, universal health
> >> > care, funding for basic research, good law enforcement, safe housing,
> >> > and many other public services, I may consider that a good deal.
> >>
> >> ### But public transport, especially zero fare, as well as universal
> >> (I presume you mean "free") health care are highly inefficient as a
> >> way of apportioning resources - and of course, provision of services
> >
> > Proof or evidence required.
> 
> ### Users almost always refuse to use them if charged the full price
> and given alternatives (private mass transport, private individual
> transport).
> 
> QED, no?

No.  This is multiply problematic.

1) How many concrete examples can you point to of this being tried?

1a) And which examples would we be looking at?  I see two main purposes
of public transit.  One, common in the US and in smaller towns, is as a
subsidy for the carless, typically the poor.  If you're too young or old
or sick or otherwise unable to drive, or can't afford a car, there's a
bus provided.  That runs every hour, is slow to get where you need to
go, and doesn't run late, so you have to organize your life around it.
Charging full price or talking about efficiency compared to car
ownership is missing the point and meaingless, because it's meant for
people who can't have cars, or sometimes for the 8-5 working crowd
who'll keep a car anyway for weekends and nights.  It's also in a sucky
space with sublinear scaling; if you doubled expenses by running twice
as many buses, you'd make the captive users happier but still not
attract anyone who had a choice.  So yeah, it won't pay for itself in
any direct sense, it's charity.

OTOH, you can have systems, usually found in major metropolitan areas,
that strive to compete directly with cars for speed and convenience.
Train lines every mile, stops every half-mile, service every 5 minutes or
less, late night service, frequent buses that ideally can pre-empt
traffic signals.  Combined with urban congestion and lack of parking,
and you get a phase transition from the space "I have a car if I can,
and I might take the bus to avoid parking if it's really convenient" to
"I take the train, and I might take a car if I like road trips a lot but
it's really a luxury".

Hong Kong has some that pay for themselves even privately, as zero-fare,
with the company owning land near the stations and profiting from the
high rent value their service provides.  The urban government equivalent
would be property taxes, or better, land value taxes.

2) The "given alternatives" are themselves heavily subsidized, just
less so in the form of simple budget items.  The roads themselves are
usually zero-fare; no one's getting charged cash for the wear and tear and
amortized costs as they drive away from their house.  Local governments
often require parking to made available in various places, an unfunded
mandate subsidizing car lifestyle at the expense of pedestrian choises.
Cars are useful in part because you can get in and drive almost
everywhere in the country, if you have the time... on government built
roads many of which probably wouldn't pay for themselves as individually
tolled segments.  Dispersed settlement favoring cars has received
massive government subsidies, ranging from subsidized homeownership to
the postal monopoly charging the same rate no matter where one lives,
rather than having to pay more to recieve mail further from city
centers.  And of course there's been the subsidy of the right to
automotive air pollution.

2a) In congested areas, public transit benefits drivers as well as
riders.  More people on the train means fewer people on the road and
competing for parking.  Subsidized public transit isn't just helping the
riders.

2b) Metro systems are expensive in part because of a choice to reserve
roads for cars, leaving subways as the main alternative for fast
transit.  A light rapid transit system, running on surface rights of
way, can be a lot cheaper to build ($30 million/mile vs. $1
billion/mile) while making cars less attractive.


So, no, if you're going to be a libertarian purist, you can't point to
the US system of roads and cars and assume that's the natural state of
affairs, or say that explicit public transit subsidies are unfair and
inefficient in the face of implicit private transport subsidies.

-xx- Damien X-)