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Comment by henvic | Hacker News Reader

Please don't. Taxing is evil and has unintended consequences.

Just charge for road use instead.

* For reference on unintended consequences of taxation I recommend Frédéric Bastiat's "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen" essay. Link: http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html (you can just jump to 'Taxes' or - better - read the whole thing as it is very interesting and not that long).

He's more recognized for the Broken window fallacy/parable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

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“Just charge for road use instead.”

I am fine if the road fees are proportional to income. Otherwise we are creating a world where public infrastructure is only available to people with plenty of money.

Road fees should be proportional to the use of the road. If two people eat the same type of hamburger, why should one pay more per calorie than someone else? It’s the same hamburger, providing the same exact nutritional value. It’s obscenely unfair that two citizens of a country are charged differently for the same exact service. It seems that is a distinct violation of the equal protection clause.

Isn't that how income taxes work? Two people pay a proportionally different amount based on their income?

I think the earlier poster is stating that an equal % tax is regressive against low income folks (sales tax being the classic regressive tax). Lower income earners pay a higher percentage of their income towards sales taxes than rich folks.

> It’s obscenely unfair that two citizens of a country are charged differently for the same exact service.

I consider "fairness" in government to include optimizing for equity over equality, because even before one considers the moral aspects, a government treating everyone exactly the same is fundamentally bad for social stability.

That's probably why it's better to finance public roads through taxation. We certainly shouldn't strive towards a world where infrastructure is only affordable to some people.

>Just charge for road use instead.

They do, through taxes. Regional monopolies like inexpensive roads and transportation benefit everyone, even if you're not the one physically driving on it.

But they do not benefit everyone equally. Everyone benefits from inexpensive food; should the government make food tax-funded? If I mainly eat lentils, I would prefer to pay for what I use. If I eat lots of beef steak, I would be very happy to have others subsidise me.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/9/2/a-thousand-hidd...

1. The cost of a dead-end residential street mainly benefits the people that live there. Everybody else just pays for it.

2. A truck drives down the road hauling cases of beer. Part of the cost of this trip is paid for via general funds. Everybody contributes a small $X to the truck's journey. Person A drinks a case of beer, so they get 1 case of beer per $X. Person B doesn't drink beer, so they get nothing for their $X.

3. Person A commutes by car to their job every week day on Highway H. Person B walks to work and never drives. Both people pay $X for Highway H, but only one of them uses it directly.

These costs are so diffused that people assume taxation is a fair way to slice it up. The real fair way:

1. The people that live on the dead-end street pay for the dead-end street.

2. The cost of the truck's journey gets factored into the price of the beer. Person A will have to pay the inclusive price to buy a case of beer. Person B pays nothing, giving them $X back to spend elsewhere.

3. Person A will have to pay to drive on Highway H. Person B saves $X. Person A thinks maybe it is smarter to not drive so much.

> Person A commutes by car to their job every week day on Highway H. Person B walks to work and never drives. Both people pay $X for Highway H, but only one of them uses it directly.

You seem to have completely forgotten about second-order effects. Person B still benefits tremendously from the logistical effects of Highway H on shipping, social mobility, government force projection capability (the original reason for the Interstate Highway System in the US), and many other factors.

Those second-order effects can still exist when the cost-of-use is covered directly.

>Everyone benefits from inexpensive food; should the government make food tax-funded?

Yes, and they do. What do you think agricultural tax-subsidies are?

Also the strawman problems you pose just to solve are a bit absurd, for reasons that I mentioned before about the nature of regional monopolies, and the fact that road costs are already covered at different levels of the government.

>What do you think agricultural tax-subsidies are?

A good example of failed policy.

>Also the strawman problems you pose just to solve are a bit absurd, for reasons that I mentioned before about the nature of regional monopolies, and the fact that road costs are already covered at different levels of the government.

Not "strawmen problems" - concrete examples of mismatched cost and use, which you do not address.

No. There is a big, big difference between a economically productive use of the common spaces and this unproductive abuse.

Unproductive abuse is a DDOS attack against the infrastructure that inhibits economically productive use of the space.

Cities should tax unproductive use at a prohibitively high rate to stop this DDOS attack.

But who defines “productive?” I might consider someone going to work as “productive,” but someone going to a friend’s house as “unproductive.” Productive is really a matter of opinion unless you want to consider economics; a homeless person riding a bus generates no income for anyone — so should they pay more to ride the bus? Unless they are actually going somewhere to engage in commerce, that would be, by definition, unproductive. Going to a friend’s house is equally unproductive from an economic sense. Who gets to be the arbiter of “productive?” That gets to be a dangerous slippery slope.

The city government.

Governments exist to define and allocate common resources.

A tax is just a fee administered by a public agency.

Or correspondingly, a fee is a tax that is administered by a private entity.

In the end, they're the same thing.

A "user pays" model accomplishes price signaling. A tax does not.

> Just charge for road use instead.

Now this would have unintended consequences.

Basically this would make transportation proportionally more expensive for poor people.

Like food and water are?

Yeah, like food and water are, so why add to the burden and make it worse?

Both of those are tax-subsidized. One as agriculture, the other as a regional monopoly, precisely because of the price discrimination that would result without it.

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