True. If you don't believe the government has any role to play in, say, paving roads, maintaining bridges, etc, then there's no "cost for society".
Well, until the bridges start falling down, anyway...
Well, until the bridges start falling down, anyway...
No, I don't believe the government is necessary to do those things.
But if you look at actual government spending, these sorts of infrastructure projects are dwarfed by things like military spending, which could use a reduction.
http://www.voxeu.org/article/public-sector-inefficiency-and-...
I live on a very long (two miles) private road that I jointly build and maintain with an association, etc. There is no government role whatsoever, and we even have bridges.
So it would appear that my experience validates your libertarian fantasy world. Look - we're actually doing it!
I've got sour news for you. Even a wealthy, well educated collection of fair minded and well intentioned people find it very difficult to maintain a dirt/gravel road to an acceptable condition. It's very difficult and costly. We are right on the edge of success or failure in this maintenance.
Further, if we were to actually pave the road (a true fantasy) it would be completely, totally unthinkable with regard to cost. Asphalt is paid for by the square foot and it isn't cheap. When you drive by a very quick section of asphalt road being resurfaced ... say 200-400 meters or something - very short ... understand that that is millions of dollars in asphalt work. Millions.
Can you build some roads and bridges without the government ? Sure, of course you can. Will they approach, in any category, even the bare minimum acceptable standard that you hold ? No.
Here's a link: http://www.dot.state.fl.us/planning/policy/costs/costs-D7.pd...
Florida says 2-lane roadway is $3.3M per mile. So a few hundred feed, costing millions? Nonsense.
1. Your parent actually actively maintains a private road, and has probably done their research...
2. It costs them so much because they just have a single road, so they can't amortize the cost over an entire city or country of roadway. Public utilities tend toward monopoly for exactly this reason -- providing the utility to any small fraction of society is enormously expensive.
Make no mistake, natural monopoly is what happens when you privatize utilities. Ever met a Comcast customer who feels anything short of contempt toward Comcast? Now imagine dealing with Comcast any time you need to drive to the grocery store. Or even leave your house.
3. Parent's numbers actually make sense when compared to Florida's, once you realize Florida has an entire state over which it can amortize costs.
Again, $M for a few hundred feet is nonsense.
Especially for a previously unpaved roadway with bridges that probably also needs widening, leveling, etc. That isn't patch work cleaning up existing paved road...
The number is high but not unfathomably so...
Anyways, either parent is telling the truth or not. But I find it hard to believe parent helps maintain a 2 mile private road and also you know better than him the cost of paving that particular road.
Which raises the question: should this very expensive road, which is primarily used by members of this specific and admittedly wealthy community, be subsidized by the rest of (relatively) poor taxpayers of that state?
Also, shifting the cost of such roads to everyone encourages even more construction in remote areas, which doesn't seem like a good thing to promote...
And actually, here in the country, there are many cell networks that do very poorly. Houses still have land lines mostly because connectivity can be very spotty. A govt-mandated tower utility would help that.
Lastly, its not about subsidizing. E.g. REC was not subsidized, just a protected class of business that was mandated to provide service to everyone in their area. Subscribers pay the whole freight. Its like insurance; those near the generation plant are kind of subsidizing those far away, but everybody gets service.
Source:
Maintenance a private road outside the USA. Labour is cheaper, however, everything else is more expensive so it balances out vs US numbers last time I checked.
Again, I was giving my own anecdotes about my own road, but then mid-comment switched to a hypothetical "stretch of road" that someone might drive by, being maintained, and in my mind I was thinking of a four-lane highway. It was unclear.
I will say, however, that with all due respect - things are more expensive here in California than they are in FL, so while 400 meters of four-lane @ the Florida rate posted above comes out to ~1.2 Million, it's probably a fair amount more in California.
It's expensive.
"Florida says 2-lane roadway is $3.3M per mile. So a few hundred feed, costing millions? Nonsense."
I was thinking of a stretch of highway or freeway - four lanes - when I asked the reader to "think of a stretch of road being worked on". Sorry - wasn't clear.
Also, I was measuring in meters. So, 400 meters of four-lane @ 6.6M per mile ... that's ~1.2M, give or take.
It's expensive.
1) If it's expensive to do for the private sector, it's expensive to do for the government, no part of the cost equation changes.
2) It only seems "cheaper" b/c the private sector would have to ask for money by providing enough value enough for you to part with your money, while government doesn't, and raises money by pointing guns at people. However, to avoid the free-rider problem, you can use assurance contracts to raise the construction money and tolls to pay for maintenance, similar to what governments would do anyways.
3) American infrastructure was rated a D+ by the ASCE, so in what way is having government the sole provider of infrastructure a guarantee of quality?
4) slightly unrelated, but do you really think we'd have the same level of urban sprawl, needing a car to get anywhere in suburbia and such a heavy reliance on fossil fuels if roads were built through market forces rather than government subsidy?
The same thing is true in most other parts of the world (i.e. who is financially responsible for building and maintaining the roads). In general you will find that the milder the climate is, the nicer the roads are.
> 4) slightly unrelated, but do you really think we'd have the same level of urban sprawl, needing a car to get anywhere in suburbia and such a heavy reliance on fossil fuels if roads were built through market forces rather than government subsidy?
It is already mostly financed through market forces by local governments and via various use taxes (e.g. fuel tax, property tax, etc)
I worked as project manager for a contractor doing public works at one point. The government (at least in the US and probably everywhere) wastes a staggering amount of money.
Not saying the government doesn't need funding. They do. But they could certainly do a lot more with less.
And actually-enforced penalties for individuals in government who stonewall the auditors because they know an honest auditor would want to reduce their budget.
We cheered when that scumbag Reagan talked about starving the beast. It was clear that even George HW Bush, Reagan's running mate knew it was a stupid idea. The problem that neocons won't talk about is that we don't have a single preferential way of allocating budget. Imagine we shrunk government income by one trillion dollars. That's the easy part but where will we cut our expenses? We haven't dealt with the difficult problem at all.
Remember that every dollar "wasted" goes to someone. If they are loud and influential, they will probably get to keep their money/credit. So basically the rebalancing brought upon by starving the beast is nothing more than a cash grab by the more powerful more influential over those less so.
I invite anyone who talks about cutting taxes to first come up with a plan to cut government spending. If the spending cut is palatable and can survive the mobs, I am in favor of starving our babies to cut taxes for the wealthy. But we can't put the cart before the horse. No new tax cuts without at least a matching spending cut that we can keep for at least a decade or so.
I don't mind discussions of cutting the federal government drastically even with overblown threats of riots and unrest. Why continue to prop up a federal system that was never designed to scale up to the size it is and that is out of control? It can't be fixed by any amount of tinkering so just let it collapse back to the original limited powers concept.
U.S. state and local governments do a much better job spending taxpayer money, just revert all these poorly run federal agencies and programs back to the state level.
We can talk about our successes with independent school districts where communities proudly fund their own schools with taxes at rates that they think are the best. Or take local police and EMS or local utilities for that matter. It is glorious when it works as it creates a sense of ownership and responsibility towards a community resource.
I agree with you in broad strokes that we can and should support devolution. However, I assert that we should not do this because our federal government was not "designed" to do this but because it is the right thing to do and it is in all our best interest to do it. We should not do something or avoid doing something based solely on what the system was "designed" to do. We should be willing to make changes to the system as we learn new things. I cringe on the amount of reverence with which we hold our founding fathers. The United States is a well recognized nation throughout the world and we do not need this crutch. (:
Any power or service the federal government was not designed to own is reserved for the individual states. All the wealth transfer programs, pension plans, and public services we have now federally can be delivered by the states. So yes, there is a "design" there, we're just not adhering to it.
And when it all reverts to the states, then we can have real fights over what's the "right thing" for the state to do and where the dollars go.
A good solution would be to create a universal basic income at the federal level funded by a no-exceptions flat tax on consumption, which keeps the federal government simple, and then let the states do everything else.
I am afraid this 12% tax will drive a lot of our economy underground forcing us to raise rates. How do we prevent that from happening?
You can believe that churches and governments can easily match and surpass whatever the federal government can dish out once economic power reverts to the States.
The difference is, as already mentioned, citizenship. The US is under no obligation to provide welfare benefits to foreign nationals or grant them citizenship. US states have no equivalent way to prevent low income US citizens from moving there and claiming benefits.
> Every year around springtime, hundreds of homeless will literally start a trek from Portland OR to Berkeley CA to get enrolled in their generous welfare programs. What you describe happens already.
How is the fact that it actually happens supposed to disprove it?
Perhaps when the States have to administer their own welfare programs, it will no longer be profitable for the individual states to shoulder the burdens of hosting the underclasses when neighboring states will not. Sanity might return to the immigration debate, it could be a really good thing.
That was kind of my point. It isn't profitable already. Increasing the magnitude would make it unsustainable. There just wouldn't be any states offering the same level of welfare programs as the federal government currently does.
> Sanity might return to the immigration debate, it could be a really good thing.
Federal universal basic income to all citizens as a replacement for existing welfare would do the same thing. Immigrants who cut the line wouldn't get it (and all the other welfare programs would be gone), which would make living here too hard to be worth breaking the law. Then we could correspondingly increase the number of legal immigrants we accept because we'll have more capacity to integrate new legal immigrants without the people who cut the line.
No? I'm glad you caught that. Illegal immigration IS profitable, that's why it continues to happen. The advocates seem to cross political lines too, everyone must be profiting from cheap labor.
I love unsustainable pants-on-fire arguments like this. Any country or state that is being overrun in a truly unsustainable way either ejects the invaders (or does worse to them) or ends up conquered.
> Federal universal basic income
It's fun to imagine how one would tinker with the system, but you're just rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
Imagine a programmer who has to document what they do every quarter hour of their work day to ensure accountability to auditors looking to reduce waste. They end up wasting more time documenting what they do than you end up saving.