Hacker News Reader

Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

Consumers shouldn't pay more for roads to subsidize trucking. Businesses which use trucking more will pay more and if it costs an arm and a leg, they will figure out how to cut costs. There are lots of PhDs in Logistics, Operations Research who know how to think about these.

Local production within the communities may become competitive if we aren't subsidizing trucking. Local production has become uncompetitive because of these perverse incentives.

Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads. Road costs should be entirely borne by businesses which are using them. The damage by cars is insignificant, too low to count. And consumers driving on roads see billboards, this is free eyeballs for businesses. Just like youtube is free with ads, roads should be free for car drivers with ads or some other form.

View on HN

> Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads.

If consumers get value from roads they should pay. Consumer road damage is certainly measurable, since plenty of roads disallow heavy trucks.

It’s silly to claim because one can see a billboard that the billboard would subsidize the value a consumer derives from roads. Putting up a billboard didn’t cause consumer utility of having a road to become zero. And private property owners are generally free to put up plenty of things, billboards included, without this odd request they subsidize others that look onto their property.

You understand that all business activity in an economy is driven by consumers. Everything is downstream of consumer demand.

Then, subsidize everything for all businesses?

Consumers are already paying heavy taxes for defense, trillions of dollars/year to protect business interests of the super rich everywhere.

I would rather that we subsidize the consumers.

(The super rich will still be super rich.)

What does this have to do with internalizing costs to businesses? By your logic, the government should just subsidize all consumer goods... Which, okay maybe I actually agree with you? (Jk I'm not that much of a socialist. I think markets are great, and we should leverage them by fully pricing externalities like road damage or pollution, enabling the market to solve some of our big problems)

Consumer demand can still be distorted.

I said this in another comment:

Imagine if we subsidized things that were an orange colour. Market prices of orange things would go down and consumption of orange things would go up. It wouldn't make sense to say "this is helping the many people that consume orange things therefore it is good".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com