[ExI] Dumb scheme to pay for resources [WAS Re: Serfdom and libertarian critiques.]

[Richard Loosemore]

John Clark wrote:
> On Mar 4, 2011, at 1:31 PM, Richard Loosemore wrote:
> 
>> So all these motorists in London each have to carry some kind of 
>> device in their car so that when a pedestian tries to use the road and 
>> slow them down, the motorist can somehow get money out of them:  "You 
>> want to cross in front of my car? There's a toll!".
>> So what is the device that will let them do this?  Ah, yes, a gun.
> 
> Anybody can use the Florida turnpike, it's not free but there are no 
> tool booths; a robot camera takes a picture of your license plate and 
> mails a bill to your home, you don't even need to slow down.

Neither you nor Rafal seem to be comprehending my point.

The logical conclusion of this insane libertarian way to design a 
society is that every aspect of a person's behavior that impinges on 
other people must have "tolls" whenever each person does something that 
potentially impacts someone else.  The reason this must happen is that 
all the things that OTHERWISE were being supplied and managed by the 
government, as a shared resource, must now be PAID FOR INDIVIDUALLY by 
all the people who try to use them.  I am just taking the libertarian 
scheme that Rafal is suggesting, to its logical conclusion.

But this means that every pedestrian crossing a street is impacting the 
resource that the car driver was trying to use, so the pedestrian must 
pay a toll for the mere act of crossing the street.

Now (are you still paying attention, or is this the limit of attention 
span for libertarians who don't like to hear awkward facts?), this 
presents the L-utopia designer with a dilemma:  either the toll SYSTEM 
has to be managed by some kind of global entity that watches every move 
that everyone makes, all the time, so that they can be charged for 
anything that they take from the "common" resources like roads, bridges, 
waterways, fresh air, and so on .... and then this Big Brother entity 
has to charge everyone a toll.  OR (the only alternative) there has to 
be some scheme whereby individual people go around negotiating and 
exacting their tolls all the time.  I was assuming that libertarians, 
who hate the idea of some kind of global entity watching everythig they 
do and charging them for every little thing they do, would prefer to 
have it all occur locally.

And in that case, I was asking HOW this was supposed to happen in (e.g.) 
the case of pedestrian and a car driver, when the pedestrian tries to 
use the road and cause the driver to slow down (thus hogging a shared 
resource).  How does the car driver set up a PRIVATE scheme to send an 
invoice to the pedestrian to force them to pay for taking the pavement 
for a few seconds?

That was the question I was asking when you replied above.

In the alternate scheme, where there is some entity that manages all the 
toll stuff, this is usually the government in today's age.  How are you 
going to set up comparable entities to manage the bridges, the air, the 
water, the warmth that comes from cities, etc etc etc.?  Which 
corporation are you going to hand the "atmosphere" over to, to have 
breathing and furnace-running and bonfire-burning and firework-buring 
become billable activities, when consumption of air has to be separately 
charged to each individual that uses it?


Geez.  Brain the size of a planet, and I have to waste it pointing out 
flaws in idiot schemes for running the planet....... ;-)

And after I asked sooo nicely for someone to produce a simulation to 
demonstrate the feasibility of these harebrained ideas, before 
inflicting any more of them on us.  :-)  Still no simulation!  Still the 
ideas keep coming!



Richard Loosemore