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Comment by baseballdork | Hacker News Reader

> Waste treatment system similar to many public systems.

So we agree it doesn’t scale. You can’t have 1,000 people each digging their own septic system around an apartment complex. What you’re proposing is adding cost and complexity to sewage in order to ensure you only pay for your shit.

> Also rural septic systems are almost never publicly funded.

Indeed, but literally all of the infrastructure up and down the supply chain that makes a $5k septic system available to you is.

> In rural areas septic is usually owned as part of mortgage or as debt services, if one cannot pay outright.

Ah, so you’d rather the poor pay interest on the ability to shit? Surreal.

> brutally poor or mentally ill

Yes, and I don’t think those people ought to be unable to shit in dignity. The libertarian dream is a nightmare.

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>So we agree it doesn’t scale. You can’t have 1,000 people each digging their own septic system around an apartment complex. What you’re proposing is adding cost and complexity to sewage in order to ensure you only pay for your shit.

The asinine approach of using a rural septic system on a Manhattan apartment doesn't scale. Metering water consumed in most cases is pretty good at finding sewage use, and water metering exists in most apartments or at least every one I've lived in.

>...complexity...

On the contrary, your system is a complicated one that instead of metered sewage or water one has an army of tax collectors who meter our earnings & property & spending, who in practice toss people in a cage when they don't pay up rather than just stop the service.

>Indeed, but literally all of the infrastructure up and down the supply chain that makes a $5k septic system available to you is.

Sure but under my proposal everyone pays for services consumed, if you think rural people are stealing your infrastructure taxes to build septic systems by all means that's an argument to 'tax' at point of consumption, since we're cheating you apparently. (Now we know you really are against paying taxes for others poop!)

>Ah, so you’d rather the poor pay interest on the ability to shit? Surreal.

Well in practice they pay interest either way, privately or via inflation and public debt gov uses to expand their scope.

>Yes, and I don’t think those people ought to be unable to shit in dignity. The libertarian dream is a nightmare

Mentally ill and the poor shit in public largely because housing is unaffordable and it isn't convenient to have to hike a long way to take a shit. If you have democratic assent and are so sure people are eager to fund the shitting of the homeless, by all means go out and open a public shittery next to them, sounds like you'll get the support.

> Metering water consumed in most cases is pretty good at finding sewage use, and water metering exists in most apartments or at least every one I've lived in.

And this is how it already works in “most places”. Where it isn’t currently doing that you propose installing meters that aren’t already there, or determining pipe size to every user to determine the proper amount to charge for their shit. How is this not adding complexity?

> your system is a complicated one

Yes, the tax code is complicated for some small cohort of people, and that should be fixed.

> Sure but under my proposal everyone pays for services consumed, if you think rural people are stealing your infrastructure taxes to build septic systems by all means that's an argument to 'tax' at point of consumption, since we're cheating you apparently.

Sure, just as soon as you pay for all of the infrastructure between your community and the septic system. I wonder how many million or billions of dollars that would add up to.

> Well in practice they pay interest either way, privately or via inflation and public debt gov uses to expand their scope.

In practice they’re spending that money on something else. This isn’t about savvy savers losing a few percent to inflation. This is about people mortgaging a way to take a shit because they need to hook up their apartment to some company’s system.

> Mentally ill and the poor shit in public largely because housing is unaffordable and it isn't convenient to have to hike a long way to take a shit.

Huh, no restrooms available in the city? Oh wait, you have to be a customer to use a lot of those restrooms… so you have to pay to shit. Crazy how that isn’t working. It’s not libertarianism that’s wrong, it’s the damn poor and mentally ill.

>And this is how it already works in “most places”. Where it isn’t currently doing that you propose installing meters that aren’t already there, or determining pipe size to every user to determine the proper amount to charge for their shit. How is this not adding complexity

? Sewage systems are built under permit virtually everywhere and the pipe size or drain units is documented. I live in about the least regulated place in the Continental US and even here my drain units are public record. Of course if everything is private connections could be added without permit since that burden falls privately.

Of course if water is unmetered and public I think the average person even worse, with tragedy of the commons and the rich or corps consuming water in mass then taxing the poor to fund it.

>Sure, just as soon as you pay for all of the infrastructure between your community and the septic system. I wonder how many million or billions of dollars that would add up to.

This doesn't make sense. You tax this in pieces, you can 'tax' at consumption in pieces without each consumer building their own billion dollars in infrastructure. If your local companies are selling PVC pipes and Portland cement to country folk, why aren't you charging them for that infrastructure instead of complaining about maybe poorer people are getting a slight discount on poop system materials at your cost (which you seem to think is good anyway, personally im noy sure how much im robbing you when i privately buy portland and pvc, but corporations siphoning tax money via subsidies etc can be a problem).

>In practice they’re spending that money on something else. This isn’t about savvy savers losing a few percent to inflation. This is about people mortgaging a way to take a shit because they need to hook up their apartment to some company’s system.

... Apartment owners mortgage the cost of their sewage pipe yes, as well as the toilet they sit on. If renting landlord pays for the pipes you rent and indirectly also pay for. This is the case whether you connect to a public or private system, taxes or not. You are not mortgaging the cost of the treatment system unless you own it.

>Huh, no restrooms available in the city? Oh wait, you have to be a customer to use a lot of those restrooms… so you have to pay to shit. Crazy how that isn’t working. It’s not libertarianism that’s wrong, it’s the damn poor and mentally ill.

If you want shitters for the homeless why don't you buy them some? Or if it's so wildly popular a cause why not solicit donations? Taxes haven't been very successful at solving the problem and you have it all figured out so you should spearhead it. How much are you committing today for shitters for the homeless?

> Sewage systems are built under permit virtually everywhere and the pipe size or drain units is documented.

You’re just repeating what I’ve already said. This already happens, but where it doesn’t you must add a bunch of overhead to make it work.

> You tax this in pieces, you can 'tax' at consumption in pieces without each consumer building their own billion dollars in infrastructure.

That is easy to say when you _already have_ tax payer funded infrastructure to start with. If you include the costs of building all the roads, ports, rail, as well as all the tax payer services that make it reasonable for employees to live in cities near the factories this stuff is made. What I’m trying to point out here is that your $5,000 shitter is going to be significantly more expensive once that’s taken into account. You are freeloading on work already paid for by others in order to make your libertarian idea remotely feasible.

> Apartment owners mortgage the cost of their sewage pipe yes, as well as the toilet they sit on.

Not talking about owners, I’m talking about renters. I’m talking about people who really ought not to have to make the decision to go into thousands of dollars of debt in order to shit just so you can say you didn’t have to contribute.

> If you want shitters for the homeless why don't you buy them some?

Because I couldn’t afford to. I’m not rich. However, society can.

> Taxes haven't been very successful at solving the problem

This is, at best, wild speculation. We do pay taxes, taxes are used to assist and shelter the homeless. You’re saying that because it hasn’t completely solved homelessness then it’s worthless and your little libertarian faction should be able to reap all the benefits of the things paid for by cities and pay nothing back into it.

The good news is that will never happen because it is so popular to provide social benefits through tax payer funds. Most people are unwilling to be such ardent boot lickers of the wealthy.

>t where it doesn’t you must add a bunch of overhead to make it work.

Unmetered water/sewage access is not popular with taxpayers and likely would be a regressive tax in favor of wealthy/corps.

> You are freeloading on work already paid for by others in order to make your libertarian idea remotely feasible.

If companies selling septic system materials rural people buy are freeloaders, this is something your jurisdiction is going to have to deal with and hopefully fix, as making out sewers public is still going to result in our people buying PVC and Portland cement from your businesses. Your issue here is not with our sewers but that you've failed to control externalities of your businesses.

>Because I couldn’t afford to. I’m not rich. However, society can.

Many taxpayers can't either. Yet you want to force them to when even you won't do it!

>. You’re saying that because it hasn’t completely solved homelessness then it’s worthless and your little libertarian faction should be able to reap all

I've said exactly what I've said. Sure you could use taxes and build a shitter next to every homeless tent (of course you admit you taxpayer have no money for that). The problem is in part housing is unaffordable, in large part due to regulations, zoning, codes, TAXES, and of course in the case of public sewers the difficult task of convincing a bunch of NIMBYs to allow their tax funded homeless bathroom to be built next to them.

I'm empowering you, since people are so willing to go along with it that they'll vote for the taxes, by all means go ahead and start a private charity and fulfill your dream. Better than what you're doing now, which is complaining to people like me who've actually personally funded and built sewage systems about how I'm a freeloader and if you could just steal enough money from others you could fulfill your goals without expending any efforts or your own money.

> Unmetered water/sewage access is not popular with taxpayers and likely would be a regressive tax in favor of wealthy/corps.

And is already extremely rare. However, what you are advocating for is retrofitting these systems in order to support your pay-for-shit plan.

> Your issue here is not with our sewers but that you've failed to control externalities of your businesses.

You are missing the point. The issue is that this system you want to move to will be built upon a system that uses taxation to fund infrastructure. Your assertion that this is a better system falls apart if you don't use any infrastructure that was funded by tax money. In other words, if everything was taxed at use from the get-go, your septic tank would _not_ cost $5k. It would be much more expensive as the costs of building/maintaining all the things we currently have would be built directly into the septic system cost instead of from tax revenue largely pulled from the wealthy.

> Many taxpayers can't either. Yet you want to force them to when even you won't do it!

This is so disingenuous as to border on lying. What you're saying is that everyone, even the desperately poor, need pay for anything they use so that you don't have to help anyone. What I'm saying is that progressive taxation is the way to pay for public goods so the poor are spared burdens the rest of us can handle.

> I've said exactly what I've said.

Indeed, and it's the typical nonsense said by libertarians who benefit from public funds and are too ignorant or simply refuse to recognize it. So self centered that they can't even recognize the massive disparity between how little they pay in taxes and how much more they receive when compared to people who live in large cities.

> if you could just steal enough money from others

There it is! "Taxation is theft". You live in a republic, suck it up, and enjoy the sewage system you were able to personally fund on the backs of everyone else.

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