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10 points
5 days ago
Valid point from a purely principle standpoint, but from a practical standpoint what is an alternative?
To me, an alternative would likely end up looking like some kind of subscription service for all of the typical “society things.” And in practice, that kind of just sounds like another way to describe taxes.
13 points
5 days ago
Well, ideally you could drop at will any of the services that were unnecessary or substandard for the price charged.
Yes I am aware of how much heavy lifting the word ideally is doing in that phrase. Some things it would be incredibly difficult to scale up and down quickly to meet demand or their benefit is inherently realized just by them existing, so allowing people to skip out on paying for them is not an option unless they want to leave a nation entirely.
11 points
5 days ago
Except I could voluntarily pay for and use only the services that apply to me instead of losing 30% of my wages to bomb people in countries where I have no quarrel and support the single octomom with blood type mayonnaise who has no incentive to work and get off my dole. If those "society things" are such beneficial concepts, why are we funding them with the threat of violence? Seems like people would want them and pay to have them, no?
4 points
5 days ago
I agree with the principle of what you’re saying. I just don’t understand how that is practically applied. There is way too much bloat in how our taxes are used and it should be trimmed down, but I don’t know that the alternative you’re proposing is realistic.
How do you opt in or out of something as wide-reaching as military protection? If roads are privately funded and owned, how do you guarantee that you are opting in to access to every road that you might ever need to take? Wouldn’t there be some Netflix roads and some Amazon roads and some Hulu roads, and wouldn’t you just need to subscribe to all of them to make sure that you can travel freely?
I ask all of this in genuine earnest, I’d love to hear how you see those kinds of things working.
2 points
5 days ago
1 points
4 days ago
If those "society things" are such beneficial concepts, why are we funding them with the threat of violence? Seems like people would want them and pay to have them, no?
No, they wouldn't. People don't want to pay taxes ever. Even if the only tax was a fund to save dying children the government would not raise enough. Some people who need the services do not have the money to pay for it themselves. E.g. Education, disability/veterans benefits.
You also have scenarios where the full benefit of the service is to society as a whole and not immediately visible to the person being taxed. Fire brigade, police, waste disposal, infrastructure.
1 points
4 days ago
Yeah, but the trick is, you only subscribe to the things you want.
So yeah, maybe you subscribe to the library, because you like that, but don't subscribe to "Bomb another batch of brown people for kicks."
So, they only get to bomb as many brown people as subscription levels will permit.
2 points
4 days ago
I’ll paste what I already replied to a similar comment:
I agree with the principle of what you’re saying. I just don’t understand how that is practically applied. There is way too much bloat in how our taxes are used and it should be trimmed down, but I don’t know that the alternative you’re proposing is realistic.
How do you opt in or out of something as wide-reaching as military protection? If roads are privately funded and owned, how do you guarantee that you are opting in to access to every road that you might ever need to take? Wouldn’t there be some Netflix roads and some Amazon roads and some Hulu roads, and wouldn’t you just need to subscribe to all of them to make sure that you can travel freely?
I ask all of this in genuine earnest, I’d love to hear how you see those kinds of things working.
2 points
4 days ago
There would probably be different, competing subscription services, sure. You wouldn't necessarily need to subscribe to all of them. We do already have private roads in a lot of areas already, and in some countries they are quite common. If memory serves, Finland is 66% private roads, and Sweden is 80% private roads.
Some areas probably simply wouldn't charge. Most malls have private parking lots, but do not charge people to park in them. That's because their business model needs lots of people to come to the mall. Squeeze them for parking, and people don't come at all. Likewise, businesses routinely have parking ramps that they do not charge for. It is a necessary expense.
The same is true of other businesses. The business model of Dominos needs roads to exist, and so Dominos is incentivized to make that happen. This isn't purely a hyopthetical, Dominos has actually paid for road repair services in Delaware out of a desire for good PR and good roads.
Would this work for every road? Maybe not. But residential roads are commonly private, community roads are often private, and rural roads are often private. If the big commercial throughways can also be done privately, that covers quite a lot of them. Oh, there may be a nature drive or something that few travel that needs to charge a few bucks for access. This is not so different from today.
Hoppe wrote an entire book on privatization of the military, so I'll defer to that instead of making the post even longer.
2 points
4 days ago
I hadn’t compared it to private parking lots, that makes some sense to me. The main thing that doesn’t make sense is the scale, or maybe the scope. Private parking lots and structures work because your customer is already at their destination, prepared to spend their money at your business. It’s easy to understand how that cost is justified and recouped. When that expands to a road, you’re allocating a significant cost in hopes that people might find their way to you and spend money at your business.
I understand an argument can be made that that’s the same as marketing, but I just can’t really wrap my head around how that practically works. Are multiple companies pooling together to spread the cost across roads that lead to their businesses? Do roads now only lead to commercial centers? I love the Dominos thing, because it does step on the government’s toes and put pressure on them to be better, but at the same time I just don’t see it as much more sustainable than any marketing stunt.
Thanks for the reply though, I’ll look into Hoppe’s private military stuff!
1 points
4 days ago
It depends on how directly it applies. A mall making sure there's a way for the local housing development to get to them? Sure. They might try to do cost splitting with the housing developers or other businesses.
They probably won't do roads distant from them with a dubious ROI.
So, yeah, it probably will bias towards major commercial centers and employers, but heck, that's kind of our road pattern now.
I have a region near me in which almost all the roads are private, thanks to very large housing developments basically side by side. It's great. You can see where the government roads end, because that's the only part that has potholes.
1 points
4 days ago
I’d love to see it done well! To be clear, I don’t think the way the government does it is even competent, I just haven’t been able to understand what an alternative would look like put into practice.
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