Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Question to Libertarians... Is this statism? Or legitimate penalties for externalities? Kinda hard for all those parents of kids with asthma to sue all those drivers and manufacturers after the fact. Isn't this reported result a benefit that wouldn't have arisen in a purely anarcho capitalist society?

View on HN

> Is this statism?

No, this is maximizing net freedom. Pollution infringes on the rights of others... a libertarian solution would have been more efficient and penalized the source on a consumption basis (gasoline tax), but the incentive would be similar.

Here's a libertarian-ish analysis on the formerly proposed Washington state carbon tax: http://www.leolinsky.com/2016/11/06/carbon-tax-initiative-73...

I hope to erase a lot of extremist misunderstandings about freedom (as defined by the broadly interpretable nonaggression principle), because I think a lot of those on HN who currently identify with the Democratic Party would find they actually have more in common with independent, moderate libertarians (or even the LP) than they realize.

Sweden already has a high petrol and diesel tax. 1L of petrol is $1.61, compared to about $0.56 in the USA.

That tax doesn't take account of where the fuel is used. The pollution caused by a long journey through the countryside is less damaging than driving within a city.

Additionally, reducing congestion improves journey times for other road users. How much should that be worth?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_and_diesel_usage_and_...

I'm all for capturing externalities in the form of consumption-based incentives, but at some point you need to draw a line for added benefit/complexity. Yes, they do have relatively high gasoline taxes, but perhaps not high enough.

Theoretically, perhaps the cost should be such that the government can use the revenue to "undo" the damage (via carbon capture + ventilation infrastructure in congested areas, for example). If there was truly a compelling case that city congestion, per liter, is so much worse: just levy an additional city petrol gasoline tax. Similar to city vs state sales taxes.

Sweden is a large and sparsely populated country. In the north, many have 1h, 60 mile commutes. In Stockholm a commute might be 1h and 10 miles. There is pretty stiff opposition to raised gasoline taxes because it is seen as an unfair on rural people. It's also regressive since income is much lower in rural areas. If "city pollution" and "congestion" are the externalities then congestion taxes actually make more sense - and are extremely popular compared to gasoline tax.

City gasoline taxes would make sense, but they don't allow hour by hour control of congestion. I don't work in the city but I can drive in "for free" e.g late in the evening.

I'd be surprised if you could commute 100km in one hour on ordinary rural roads. I have a colleague who commutes from Åmot to Drammen and he takes about an hour and its only about 60km and that's pretty good roads most of the way. I know Swedish roads are often better than Norwegian ones but are they really that much better? Or do Swedes just drive a lot faster?

Roads are certainly straighter and wider in rural Sweden than Rural Norway, because of the geography (topography rather perhaps). In Norway you are never far from the next tunnel.

If you live next to e.g. The E4 that spans the length of Sweden (most people in the northern 2/3 do) the speed limit is 110/120 for the most part so at least in summer conditions you have no problem doing well over 100km/h since there is so little traffic. If you have a long commute in rural Sweden it's almost certainly mostly freeway driving in a very flat landscape.

https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:E4,_Nyk%C3%B6ping_2009.j...

Obviously you are driving much slower at the beginning/end of such a commute, but normally you can do it without being slowed down by traffic. On more normal rural roads and in winter conditions you might be lucky to do 70 or 80 (90-100 on the largest roads).

It's actually an interesting difference between city and country - in rural areas we always talk about distances in km (since they translate directly to driving time with an expectation of doing 80-100km/h no matter where you are going, since traffic or road quality is almost never a factor) whereas in cities a distance is almost always given as a driving time.

True about the tunnels but in fact they generally make things better not worse. The problem with roads in Norway is that there is almost always a hill of granite rock or a lake or fjord in the way. My 22km commute to Drammen hugs the edge of the fjord and the longest straight is probably not more than about 300m.

Swedes do overspeed a lot more than their Norwegian neighbors. More speed cameras in Norway as well. Even the speed limit is lower (80km/h) in Norway (vs. 90km/h in most of the EU)

Source: a recent (last May-June) road trip Stockholm <-> Bergen with quite a bit of rural/mountain exploration.

> city petrol gasoline tax

Higher tax for gasoline sold inside the city?

A lot of people commute, and would just fuel up outside the city limit. Others would make an extra trip out of the city only for that.

> Higher tax for gasoline sold inside the city?

I'm all for taxes that attempt to follow a mathematical distribution, which makes the most sense in such a scenario. This would have to be a "federal government" thing, which on top of the pollution tax (equal everywhere) adds a congestion tax that increases as you approach dense city areas, such that it's probably not worth it to drive more to fill up the tank. But no system will be perfect so it's best to minimize complexity in my opinion.

I learned recently that Finland is contemplating removing tax on both gasoline and cars (including the purchase of cars) and replacing it with a tax on distance driven, using some kind of mandatory installed device.

That was indeed the suggestion of one of the government ministers, but the proposal caused a media storm and was withdrawn within a week.

Oh right, I didn't know that.

That seems counter-intuitive because it would make vehicles with high fuel consumption more economical than before. I can't imagine that his is their intention?

No, it isn't. But it's not entirely opposed to their intention either.

Try to make a list of your own of what you personally think is important goals to optimise traffic policy for: Less noise in the city, less pollution in the city, fewer traffic accidents, fewer people killed, fewer people hurt, faster journeys, lower cost, less fuel spent, less fuel per kilometer, less per joyrney, and so on and so forth. Many of them partly overlap. Is saving fuel important to you?

IMO, I'd disregard the drivers fuel cost savings completely and focus completely on emissions, noise and accidents. If optimising for lower total emissions leads to lower fuel costs per km, fine. If higher, also fine.

effect on roadways would be far greater than any pollution cost and that translates quite well into fuel consumed

a libertarian solution would have been more efficient and penalized the source on a consumption basis (gasoline tax)

The purpose of the tax in question isn't to lower pollution, though: it's a congestion tax intended to spread out traffic over time to reduce congestion (lower the need for more and/or larger roads). Lower pollution just happened to be a side effect.

The official website says both:

"Congestion taxes are justified by the fact that the people who are contributing towards congestion and environmental problems are paying for the costs to society this causes."

http://transportstyrelsen.se/en/road/Congestion-taxes-in-Sto...

They aren't taxing bicycle riders as I understand it, who also cause a great deal of congestion in cities (at least in US cities I've lived).

I am certainly no libertarian but I think the framing is a bit uncharitable, anarcho-capitalism is a radical fringe, the vast majority of ideological libertarians (my estimate) are okay with the state internalizing externalities, although there would be objections to its ability to do this fairly and effectively

In this case, it isn't fair - the externality is pollution, but the fee is unrelated to the emission levels of the vehicle. But even such an inefficient system is still superior to doing nothing and letting the public suffer the externalities.

It's astounding that these politicians and bureaucrats who ostensibly have the right idea almost exclusively come up with these complex schemes full of mis-incentives, instead of using simple, correct solutions, like raising gasoline taxes.

An example: the Obama administration set forth a regulation that forces automakers to produce one 50 MPG vehicle in their line-up within the next five years. Of course, this is a stealth tax which has similar negative effects (and positive ones) to a higher gasoline tax, but the negative effects -- like higher car prices -- are less traceable to the mandate, which is good for politics. However, there are less obvious negative effects, like raising the barrier to entry for competition (it is no coincidence that the heavily regulated auto industry has very few startups -- Tesla being an anomaly.) A new company that only produces 30-45 MPG SUV models cannot compete, whereas it would be relatively competitive with a higher gasoline tax.

> It's astounding that these politicians and bureaucrats who ostensibly have the right idea almost exclusively come up with these complex schemes full of mis-incentives, instead of using simple, correct solutions, like raising gasoline taxes.

It's because the issue they're directly trying to tackle is congestion, not pollution (which is only being tackled as a secondary issue). Also, in Britain there are already high petrol taxes, they make up about half the price of fuel. In general it's a good thing, and it does discourage a completely car dependent society - people to live closer to the centre, closer to work, use alternatives like walking, cycling, public transport etc - but it's not a particularly direct way to tackle air pollution, or at least it doesn't tackle the particular spikes in air pollution you get in the cities. In order to tackle air pollution in London using only fuel tax, you'd have to make driving in the countryside ruinously expensive. So you get layered policy - medium fuel tax nationwide, congestion charge for the centre (where it is the biggest issue), and an air pollution charge, or limit, covering the whole city.

I do agree that often politicians are not that great at designing these things (the proposed air pollution charge in London is rather strangely designed for instance), and the complexity is partly incompetence, but it's also partly because the problem is complicated.

See my other comment -- why not just have an added petrol tax at city gas stations? They are trying to address both issues, but the issue of just 'being around' (the source of congestion) is a very dubious thing to tax, whereas carbon emissions are not and taxing them produces the same intended incentives.

Congestion is not a kind of linear cost, and pollution is not its only externality. It also makes everyone else around you slower. Congestion is actually complicated. Once a place is congested, the marginal addition of a car makes traffic flow relatively much worse, and vice versa for the removal of a car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic...

It's extremely complicated -- far too complex to effectively tax every aspect, especially with a scheme like the one proposed. It matters whether you're making turns into traffic, where you're going, length of time on the road, how many others are on the route you chose, how quickly you accelerate, how alert of a driver you are, the type of car your drive, whether you're a pedestrian who rushes to go at the end of a signal, etc. But I don't like the idea of taxing people for "being out" when it's a stretch to fundamentally link that to infringing on the rights of others in a way that truly needs to be regulated. They already paid for the roads, and should be able to use them as they please. The petrol tax captures the necessary incentive.

My thoughts are that large, and therefore complex, political structures have a harder time converting the right idea to something that can be implemented practically.

Sweden, where the OP example comes from, is a relatively small political entity. 10 million people represented by 349 members of parliament, who are elected through a proportional representation system.

We have high gasoline taxes. Actually a carbondioxide tax and an energy tax. It also attracts VAT. In 2016 the petrol (95) price was 13,02 SEK / litre ($1.50) of what 8,64 SEK ($0.99) was taxes.

However, in Stockholm it wasn't enough to combat emissions and congestion. So rather than penalising all car travel across the relatively sparsely populated country, it seemed to make sense to have a toll at the city borders.

> So rather than penalising all car travel across the relatively sparsely populated country,

Everyone has brought up this point, but I think a higher city petrol tax would cover that.

In Europe we have high taxes on fuels and CO2 emissions, but London and Paris still have worse air pollution than many US cities. Mostly because automakers focussed on Diesel engines to maximise MPG at the cost of everything else (NOx, particulates etc)

Yes, and many European countries tax diesel less than gasoline. I think when these sorts of policies were enacted only heavy vehicles like trucks, buses and cars that were driven a lot (taxis, mostly) used diesel, and there was an extra yearly per-vehicle "diesel tax" that made buying a diesel car economically unfavorable unless you drove a lot.

I think this sort-of ties into the political ideology where "luxury consumption" is bad. I.e. truckers transport Important Stuff(TM) and thus deserve a tax rebate on fuel, whereas a private person driving their own vehicle is bad, and should be discouraged.

But, the world changed (or, lets say the balance between the different taxes, incomes etc.) and at some point it started to make economic sense for the average Joe to buy a diesel car instead of a gasoline one.

But of course, changing the tax policy by getting rid of the diesel tax rebate runs into fierce opposition by the trucking/taxi/etc. lobby. So here we are.

> A new company that only produces 30-45 MPG SUV models cannot compete, whereas it would be relatively competitive with a higher gasoline tax.

Wouldn't that be the point? Low mpg cars are undesireable.

It would be producing the most fuel efficient SUV's on the market, and it wouldn't be allowed to compete... Some people are going to get SUV's or trucks no matter what.

The fee goes to the state, not to the victims. Therefore, it's statism. Nobody knows what would have happened in a "purely anarcho capitalist society" for lack of experimental data.

(That's assuming the study is even correct, and I don't claim to be a libertarian or speak for them.)

Not sure what would be libertarian, but it sounds like an obvious externality?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com