Nailed it on the head! Everyone wants someone else to pay for services. Nobody is saying "Raise my taxes - I appreciate these services". We're all complicit.
Now in the US, I can't seem to find anyone who think this. My biggest issue is that I can't even find anyone who thinks that the government is the people. Everyone seems to think of the government as this black box that has a mind of its own and inflict laws and rules upon us. While I'm much more used to the common thinking that the people rule, and the government simply enact our rule. We elect it, we pay for it, and therefore it simply does what we elected and paid for it to do.
I'm not sure what makes up that difference, but it could be the bi-partisanery. It's a shame too, because it often fails to capture fine grain requirements. Like say I wanted a very liberal economy, while keeping gun rights strong and conservative norms in place? Or the other way around? There's no kind of choice like that. So you lysine end up for choosing based on your top issue only.
East and West Germany, North and South Korea, Maoist Guangzhou and Unregulated Hong Kong. Time and time again it has been shown that a large collectivist state does not deliver on any of its promises, but instead creates poverty and misery.
Now social democratic states can be relatively effective with a smaller population, and when administered by efficient, civic minded and hard-working people. The US Federal Government does not qualify.
It ignores the vast majority of history with no functional government, no taxes, and free markets such as say, 3000BC in Moscow --- take your pick. Was there technological advancements, well maintained cities, and a prosperous middle class of entrepreneurs and innovators in societies free of coercion? Where were the emergent social orders which arose as an inherent stochastic process from individual capital pursuit in say, 600AD in Berlin?
These only started happening after the rise of civic society and only in places with well-organized, democratically run institutions.
These apologists also choose to ignore any counter evidence.
There's over twice as many doctors per 1,000 people in Cuba than the US, however those facts are dismissed.
When people talk about how decrease in things like open sewage, food-borne disease and other civic advancements lead to increase in longevity, those facts are dismissed.
When people talk about how there's more affordability and more equitable medical care under democratically administered health systems, those facts are dismissed.
When people talk about what Nestle has done to privatized water, what the diamond industry has done to Africa, how the market-based oil system has kept the middle east in 21st century monarchies, those facts are dismissed.
Such claims as miraculous progress due to privatization are absurdist fantasies and easily refuted without even having to bring up their abysmal failures such as Puerto Rico, Enron, Pinochet's Chile.
There's over twice as many doctors per 1,000 people in Cuba than the US, however those facts are dismissed.
And how does this effect the quality of life in Cuba? Life expectancy is the same [0]. Are working class Americans creating makeshift boats to sail to Cuba in order to benefit from the superior conditions?
When people talk about how decrease in things like open sewage, food-borne disease and other civic advancements lead to increase in longevity, those facts are dismissed.
Those are good things. Low tax, high income places tend to have these features as well, strangely enough. I recommend visiting Hong Kong or Singapore.
When people talk about how there's more affordability and more equitable medical care under democratically administered health systems, those facts are dismissed.
Those aren't facts. Those are vague hand waves.
When people talk about what Nestle has done to privatized water, what the diamond industry has done to Africa, how the market-based oil system has kept the middle east in 21st century monarchies, those facts are dismissed.
I never claimed markets were always benevolent. Simply that they tend towards more prosperity than collectivism. Also none of what you pointed to is particularly free of state involvement - states are all complicit.
You can "cherry pick" the worst examples of what corporations have done all you like, they pale into comparison to the cherry pickings of the worst thing public institutions like states have done (famines, genocides, world wars).
Such claims as miraculous progress due to privatization are absurdist fantasies and easily refuted.
And yet you have failed to do so.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Part of the problem is that we keep electing people that want to destroy government instead of people that want to make government work better.
> East and West Germany
In your analysis does West Germany qualify as an example of glorious free market or as a social democratic state that is too small to serve as a good example?
What didibus said applies to almost every developed country in the world, there are definitely those ideas towards government in Germany (including West Germany before reunification), Japan, and the UK. In most developed countries, you would be hard-pushed to find any party which followed attitudes you might describe as 'starve the beast', 'the best government is the least government' and so on. Even the most conservative parties in those countries in general do not think like that.
As a counterpoint, US is only #8 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
I could have a broader discussion on taxation if you want, but I find it's important to establish, and agree, upon a number of facts before those can start being productive. It's a long haul conversation.
http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=2&ser...
By the end of that time period the US had become a much more powerful country, but the average person was not significantly more wealthy compared to those in other developed countries than they were at the start. Which would lead me to think the difference is mostly down to other factors - for instance natural resources, mining, timber, agriculture etc and also cheap plentiful land for house-building, the only industrial nation left standing after WWII, etc.
a) Pure Communism. The state builds the roads. The state needs road workers and workers need food so the state grows food. The workers need steamrollers so the state manufactures steamrollers. The workers need asphalt so the state mines gravel. The entire economy is centrally planned and collapses like the USSR.
b) Pure Capitalism. A private company owns the road. You need their permission to leave your house, take deliveries, receive an ambulance, connect to the power grid, etc. They charge what the market will bear. Everyone becomes a serf of the road company.
c) Capitalist Social Democracy. The state collects taxes and takes bids for private contractors to build the roads, which the state then owns and allows all people to use at no charge.
Only one of those actually works.
Tolls have the pricing wrong. There is no unit cost so the problem is apportioning the fixed cost. A platinum mine clearly derives more profit from the road than a potato farmer, so why should we charge per truck (tolls) rather than per dollar of profit (taxes)? All that does is price low-profit (i.e. more efficient) enterprises out of the market, which is exactly what we don't want.
In addition to that we already have a tax collection infrastructure which is not going away, but collecting tolls would require a redundant toll collection infrastructure on top of that.
Congestion tolls are the rich man's way of getting the government to build enough infrastructure for them without having to pay for enough infrastructure for everybody.
If there is congestion it's either because you don't have enough roads or because you don't have good enough mass transit which is dumping the load it should be carrying onto the roads.
Your point about the rich getting infrastructure seems like a non sequitur here. It's voters' job to get their representatives to build enough infrastructure, not just the rich.
I agree that congestion tolls are somewhat regressive, but the solution is to have a progressive tax system, not to avoid efficiency taxes.
You also have the inefficiency of destroying demand outright. Some people will just stay home.
It also seems like the presence of congestion would already be diverting traffic to less busy times, because nobody wants to sit in traffic. So there is not a lot of low-hanging fruit there.
And if you want to shift demand to mass transit through pricing, instead of making the roads more expensive, make mass transit less expensive. Then you don't need a toll collection infrastructure for roads and may even be able to eliminate the fare collection infrastructure for mass transit.
> In a lot of jurisdictions it's essentially impossible to build enough road so there is zero traffic, because buildings can grow upwards but roads cannot.
Sure they can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Bridge
But high density cities are the obvious case for mass transit improvements.
> Your point about the rich getting infrastructure seems like a non sequitur here. It's voters' job to get their representatives to build enough infrastructure, not just the rich.
The point is that congestion pricing benefits the rich over the poor, as compared with alternatives like funding another bus or subway line via taxes, or reducing/eliminating fares. Which voters care about when deciding what to get their representatives to do.
> I agree that congestion tolls are somewhat regressive, but the solution is to have a progressive tax system, not to avoid efficiency taxes.
It's politically a lot easier to not impose regressive fees than to impose them and then try to balance it by transferring more money to low/middle income people who are already paying negative effective tax rates.
All the other arguments apply equally well to other consumables that are normally priced, like food and energy. Consumption taxes are inherently regressive, and poor people consume more of their income than their rich, but the solution is not to simply price consumables at $0.
IMO, the burden should be to show why roads are such a special good that they should always be free, regardless of externalities.
You're right that mass transit should be a part of the equation. Singapore is a city where this works well -- mass transit is (relatively) cheap, universal, and efficient. Car ownership is ridiculously expensive due to taxes, and congestion pricing is high (around $15 at rush hour) [1]. This prices road travel appropriately, as a luxury good in a dense and crowded metropolis, and pushes all normal transportation needs onto mass transit.
They're special because essentially the entire cost is the construction cost. If you want another loaf of bread then the farmer has to grow more wheat. It has a unit cost.
If you want to drive on the road then either the road capacity already exists or it doesn't and your choice of whether to drive doesn't change that. If you decide to stay home it doesn't save the government money. It's having the ability to drive on the road that costs money, not exercising it once the road is already there.
What congestion pricing does is suppress demand, i.e. to remove the (economic) ability of some people to drive, which can reduce the need for transportation capacity. But we don't want to suppress demand. Demand is good. People going out and participating in the community and the local economy is good. It might be better that people use mass transit than drive cars, but the way to achieve that isn't to make driving worse, it's to make mass transit better -- to stimulate demand rather than suppress it.
The apparent appeal of congestion pricing is that it nominally generates revenue, as opposed to improving or subsidizing mass transit which nominally consumes revenue. But in practice the result is the opposite because suppressing rather than stimulating demand for local transportation would mean there is less activity in the local economy.
Congestion also happens because the market is distorted and decisions have not been made to build quality, affordable, housing near the jobs that workers have. (Which reduces the need for commuting at all.)
> Congestion also happens because the market is distorted and decisions have not been made to build quality, affordable, housing near the jobs that workers have. (Which reduces the need for commuting at all.)
You are entirely correct. Building more housing near where the jobs are is an excellent alternative.
"C" is what leads to things like corporate bail outs.
Parenti talked about this with Conrail in the 80s. It was a train system that was put in public trust because it couldn't make money in the 70s. Then after the public made it profitable, under Reagan, it was reprivatized - not because it didn't work, but because it did work.
"C" goes beyond this in corruption. You get "compromises" where you have private health-care paid by public taxes (obamacare) or medicare part D with prescriptions being covered but the government forbidden from negotiating the prices. Or you get private for-profit schools able to use government loans for tuition and getting to the corrupt state of affairs we have now.
No, "C" is a terrible idea because it's a giant funnel into the hand of corrupt bank accounts - it promotes the state to prop up forms of dysfunctional capitalism.
In fact if you look at the total tax burden by country, including state tax and other things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates) You see that the US is higher than places like Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands - way above France and the UK. We pay more and get less, and it's all because of "C".
For instance, arguably schools are primarily for education. So increasing the access to and quality of education is probably a decent goal.
For profit systems certainly have increased the access to, but arguably deceased the quality of, and arguably education is only incidental to the true project, which is profit.^1
It's this problem, where we entrust civic needs in private hands and hope the needs are satisfied incidentally.
The problem with communism is that it's somewhat the same thing. Instead of economic capital, they fight for political capital using a similar perversion of incentives.
I don't think there exists a Grand Unified Equation that works for all civic needs and I don't think that the best answers already exist.
Instead, I think it should be openly and honestly researched like all other sciences and leave the sportsmanship and team cheering world it currently occupies.
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[1] For-Profit schools may have their place. I don't know much about auto mechanics or plumbing, but I can imagine a certified for-profit program would be a fine way to do this. I can also imagine them cutting costs, paying off inspections, and passing everyone so nobody stops paying the tuition. The goal is to not make ripping people off and cheating them out of an education such a profitable and incentivized thing to do.
The thing you're really criticizing is government corruption. A corrupt government will screw you no matter its ideology.
It is the exploitation of government that is inherently corrupt and the exploiter who is the corrupter. The commingling of such interest leads to the pursuit of private profit in the name of the public trust.
The calls for less government are constantly in the name of removing the watchdogs and observers, the enforcers and regulators - the only counterbalance to this incestuous relationship.
They call for a removal of oversight to alleviate corruption and a forfeiture of authority and action to increase responsibility.
The only perplexing thing is how so many continue to be startled and bewildered by the direct consequential policies of encouraging such statecraft.
b) dramatized perhaps but ok
c) layers on ridiculous rule after rules, hands out contracts then only to those than can afford to abide all the rules (conveniently they're also related or friends with those people), which is started layering on after its propaganda engine convinced the public it was to prevent government doing a bad job of spending their taxes. Then fast fwd to 2016 and wealth inequality has gotten so bad the whole thing looks rather untenable without a serious rethink
Which one is workable again?
Is it? These things were predicted long as a consequence of state socialism long before the USSR existed, and we still don't learn our lessons (venezuela)
Yet the "greatest reduction in both poverty and mortality" is a relatively recent phenomena happening during the rise of publicly accountable civic institutions. [1]
To then attribute this with something that did not lead to this process in the first 69,800 or so years is, in my opinion, pretty poor logic.
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[1] In fact, in Africa the greatest rise came after the decolonization post-ww2 and the establishment of states and representative governments. To say the predecessor extractive industries under colonialism weren't "capitalist" is also, quite incorrect.
I tend to belive it was more the morals of the age of enlightenment and the progress in modern science, which was probably accentuated by those same morals which caused all that. And today, I see a move away from those morals, which is a little alarming I think. But I'd similarly would need to come up with a pretty good proof for all that, as nothing is obvious when so many variables are at play.
In the case of science, this is the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" that is often talked about today, but really coincided with the enlightenment. Scientific ideas compete in the literature for dominance, and that grow the most acceptance over time eventually dominate. Both Newton's calculus and gravitational theories proved to be subject to quite a bit of criticism (from Gottfried Leibniz and Robert Hooke, respectively), and of course Newton's gravitational theory has become dominant, though I have heard that the calculus we learn today is closer to that of Leibniz than that of Newton. Likewise, Darwin's theory of natural selection was subject to intense a persistent criticism for nearly 100 years -- Darwin's Theory of Natural selection was published in 1856 and the Scopes trial was not decided until 1925, and the Supreme Court only struck down laws outlawing teaching of evolution in 1968. Today, of course, countless scientific theories are competing for dominance in the scientific literature across the world -- a process that has been fundamental to the monumental scientific gains we have made since the time of Newton.
Likewise, secular theories of morality have been almost entirely emergent in nature. Adam Smith first proposed that morality was the consequence of compassion, learned by each of us as we grow up and figure out that making others happy makes us happy, and seeing misery makes us unhappy (he called this "mutual sympathy of sentiments"). He claimed that as we grow, each of us comes up with our own moral code based on what we discover to cause mutual sympathy of sentiments, and that society's moral sense is derived from each of our individual moral codes. In fact, Adam Smith first used the term "the Invisible Hand" in his "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" to describe how societal morality is derived from individual moral codes. An example of this in our lifetime is the growing acceptance of lgbtq people in the west, or in the generations before us, the about face in the moral attitude towards race. Today, that arguments is carried on by the likes of Steven Pinker, who claims that our sense of morality is continually moving towards acceptance and away from violence, which he attributes to commerce (which forces people to interact with each other), and centralized government, by forcing people to act as people of a court rather than as warriors -- though I might prefer the term civilized government.
That said, none of these ideas are even slightly novel. Lucretius first expounded on them in his "De Rerum Natura", and obviously the giants of classical liberalism explained them in much greater depth. Charles Darwin was brought up in the tradition of the Scottish enlightenment thinkers, and very much surrounded himself with the ideological successors to classical liberalism and, in particular, David Hume. In the economic sphere, Hayek devoted his entire life to the idea of emergent phenomenon. And lastly, most of the examples here are taken from "The Evolution of Everything" by Matt Ridley.
The thing in the US is that I don't hear anyone talking about what they're even trying to accomplish. Do citizen even agree there? Why isn't there a conversation about that?
If we had a testing function, something we all agree on that this is the outcome we all or at least the majority wants for the society we're in.
Then we'd have a way to judge how a government did, or what worked and what didn't, and we could focus on iterating and improving our output towards what we all want.
Unfortunately, I think some minority groups, often corrupt, often in power or rich, they spend a lot of money and effort to switch up the conversation away from what people want and towards what they want, and then they have massive teams working to realize their vision.
Don't try to give any benefit of the doubt to the people you disagree with on this. Don't try to see things from their perspective, and whatever you do, don't assume they have good intentions - you might just end up understanding someone else a little better and be forced to change your world view.
They receive multi-million dollar contributions from organizations whose riches were made from things like defense contracts, for-profit education and for-profit prisons.
You are advocating to what? Ignore that?
Beyond that their claims are faulty and not reflective of reality.
I used to have a facebook group where I'd take the AEI posts and dissect them. They'd do something like have two circles representing values, but the values are actually the radius of the circles ... so they are off by 3.14*r^2 in representation of the differences.
There were many other things where they would do something like float some chart so the bottom value is only 5% less than the top, and then zoom in so it covers a very small time period, and then purport it as being significant.
Literally every day. It was amazing. I went there right now, second post, comparing planets to GDP (http://9ol.es/planet.png) using inaccurate metrics of planet size and inaccurate calculations with relative mass along with depicting 3d objects as 2d... it's wildly inaccurate.
This 1000x.
This or something like it has been called the "paranoid style in american politics" as early as 50 years ago: http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-ame...
I mean, American immigrants are literally a self-selected population of people who found their home societies chafing and restrictive enough that they were willing to migrate thousands of miles at great risk to build a new life. And this migration was repeated time and again within the US -- as each part of the country was populated, waves of Americans decided to strike out West and get out from underneath the bankers, politicians, and other elites that would take over.
I think paranoia about government will always be the flip side to wanting to be fully free and independent (whether or not that is achievable in reality).
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/welfare-...
I'd happily spring for a slightly more up-market model of civilization, too, so I'm one of those pretty-well-off tech guys who advocates for higher taxes on me and people like me.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/electio...
...bombs, bailouts, bribes, bureaucratic inefficiency, lining the pockets of lobby groups, incarceration for victimless crimes, keeping cops charged with police brutality on the payroll...
I would encourage you to check the officially published breakdown of how taxes are spent - and then consider what the actual break down might look like.
People have a real cognitive dissonance when it comes to the state. I think it's hard for people to deal with the the fact that money will inevitably be taken from you under threat of force to fund things you hate, that you find wrong, or that ruins peoples lives. It's much easier to just close your eyes and think of roads, schools and libraries.
I.e. state welfare by another name.
Government jobs (and contractor jobs) are stable, pay well even for people who don't have great educational backgrounds, and companies like Lockheed know how to spread around defense dollars so it becomes a jobs program in all 50 states.
In this sense, the inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.
People bitched, I said "quiet you +$100k yr coworkers who moved here recently after hearing how rad it is! It's rad because of these things!"
I'm happy to piss an the parade of anyone who complains about paying taxes. Especially those that benefit disproportionately, like tech workers (high tech being subsidized by the government since the industrial revolution came along).
I don't want someone else to pay for it but I want them to contribute.