Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdwr | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the trade-off between time and money (and how it differs based on wealth).

"Free for all" parking spaces allow you to trade your time (hunting a spot) for parking, the same way coupon-clipping trades time for a discount on food.

You can say "eliminate coupons, all food should be at market price", but coupons really are an effective way of helping people. They segment the market by being too time-consuming for wealthy people to bother with, and are a job for people who don't have a higher-paying one.

View on HN

You can trade your time for goods, but others might trade money for time. Something to think about maybe.

Free Shakespeare in the Park is a New York City civic tradition dating back to the 1950s. It is, as the name suggests, free to the public, but because Central Park’s Delacorte Theater has a finite number of seats, tickets are given out on a first come, first served basis. Some folks, who either can’t or don’t want to stand in line to get tickets, have taken to employing line-standers to do the waiting for them. According to Sandel, the price for a line-stander in 2010 was “as much as $125 per ticket for the free performances”

This is only true if you completely discount the very significant cost of owning a motor vehicle.

The closest option to truly free continues to exist and has always existed: walking

And, unlike with food so much of the time, in this case the cheaper option is also healthier.

That's not why coupons exist, though, it's just a side effect. If coupons didn't exist and your goal was to help poor people eat, coupons would be a weird way to do it.

Why is it weird? It's a lot like the 10c can and bottle levy. Ostensibly for recycling, but also gives homeless people a job. Sneaks under the radar of regular-sized market forces, and gives them some agency in their lives.

It’s pretty badly targeted. Lots of poor people don’t have much time, and lots of better off people have lots of time and enjoy things like screwing around with coupons to get a discount. It also doesn’t do much for extreme poverty. If you have no money, it doesn’t matter if you can get a coupon for half off a loaf of bread or whatever, you still can’t afford it. So you end up giving more help to people who need it less.

If you want to help poor people buy food, give them money to buy food.

Let's go back to may example of bread and milk.

Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange? I would hope not. It might help the poor, but would be a really crappy way of doing so.

Free parking certainly might help the poor a teensy bit. But it's an incredibly bad way of doing so that comes with all kind of other bad side effects.

If helping the poor is our goal, that is not a good way of doing so. You're better off charging a market rate for parking and then taking that money and giving it to poor people.

> a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange

You've just described how rationing in Eastern Bloc countries worked.

> Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange?

Sounds almost exactly like the argument made here https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/citizen-coup...

> too time-consuming for wealthy people to bother with, and are a job for people who don't have a higher-paying one.

What makes you think poor people have more free time than wealthy people?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com