From: smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Newsgroups: uk.misc
Subject: Re: Transport subsidies - Was: Car Parking
Date: 16 Dec 92 21:05:09 GMT
Reply-To: P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Organization: University of Bristol

I'm going to have to start winding this down in preparation for news
being inaccessible (to me) over the Christmas period, but...  Consider
this my parting shot.  Tired fingers, last minute rush, better things
to do at 8PM (enjoyable though this is), and besides, I've argued with
enough libertarians in my life to know that I'm no more likely to
convince you than you are to convince me.  (If anyone else wants to
take up the argument, feel free to chat amongst yourselves. :-)

In article <29455@castle.ed.ac.uk> fofp@castle.ed.ac.uk (M Holmes) writes:
>smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee) writes:
>No, folks can get together for an integrated bus service if they want,
>so long as people who don't want to use it don't have to pay to run it.

And, so get a free ride.  The point you are missing is that the public
transport does benefit you.  If you use it, it's obvious of course.  If
you drive, each busload of people is 50 (30, 60, pick a number) fewer
cars to end up stuck behind at traffic lights with a concomitant
savings in fuel and frustration, and is 50 more parking spaces
available to you when you get where you're going.  I maintain that it
is totally reasonable, therefore, for you to pay for this.  Even if you
stay home, the decreased traffic load will improve the efficiency of
moving goods around, and so you will benefit from lower prices
(assuming the free market works).

>I guess the best situation would
>be for folks to own their own local roads, then they could decide what
>they wanted done.

I'll tell you what they'd want done, because the local papers are full
of articles and petitions to the city council about it.  They (each
group) would want their road closed to all traffic except the folks
who live there.  Of course, these petitions usually fail, for the
simple reason that someone clever in the city planning department can
see the flaw in this line of logic -- specifically that if you let
everyone do this, then everyone is trapped on their little bit of road,
and no-one can go anywhere.

>>>>Then you are 'forcing' people who need to use those roads to pay for
>>>>them whether they wanted them unclogged or not. 
>
>There's no force in it. If they want to travel on your property then
>they pay the fee. They have the choice to travel by a different route or
>not to travel at all.

Right, so if I were to buy the road your house is on, and the back
alleyway (if there is one), and impose a mandatory toll, then I'm not
forcing you to pay it?  There are parallels in US transportation
history, again, which I think apply (and, no doubt, you don't, but
that's OK).  In railroads, this time.  

Applying the lessons learned there, what could I do to become filthy
rich?  Well, I could buy an inner ring road in any city (either the
existing one, from the council, or the land necessary to build a new
one).  Then put up toll gates on all existing crossings, and refuse
rights of way to cross my land with new roads.  Then, just sit back and
watch the money roll in.  

Why should I sell?  Either you will pay me, or you'll leave -- in which
case, I can probably buy up the town centre at a song, for future
development.  You'll retaliate in kind?  No, this is a game for a very
few, very rich, individuals, and you're not one of them.  I've reached
an agreement with the other players that we'll each stick to our own
patch.  Comparable tactics made a lot of early railway moguls very rich
-- a monopoly-like stranglehold on the right bit of land, and you're
in.  Didn't do anything for the communities involved.

>For people just walking, the
>maintenance cost could be so low that free riders could be tolerated.

Non-free-market solution.  See my article elsewhere.  Free 'walkers and
cyclists' are a marketing or operating disadvantage, and so can't be
permitted.  There is no reason to believe that it would happen otherwise.

>Force is when you make someone do something that they don't
>want to do, not when you charge them for using something of yours
>voluntarily and in full knowledge of that charge.

No, too simple.  It depends upon what that 'something' is, and also
upon whether a true free market exists in that 'something' or whether
monopoly or oligopoly rules apply.  If the 'something' is a virtual
or actual necessity of life, and the market is under control of a
monopolist or a small group of companies colluding, then it is entirely
possible for 'force' to come into play.  Again that has been historically
seen on many occasions.  If, for example, I own the only water supply in
town, then I can force you to pay whatever I like for water.  Your
freedom of choice is then limited to 'pay up or piss off'.

Similarly, transportation is the basic bloodstream of society.
Improper ownership patterns could certainly (and would probably) result
in economic force being used.  You might be able to justify (and
arrange) for there to be 3 or 4 competing trunk roads from London to
Edinburgh, for example, but you're certainly not going to get 3 or 4
competing road operators running roads past your house.

>>Fuzzy thinking, again.  You've got no problem with forcing people to
>>pay for rights of way
>
>Yes I have. I advocate that they be allowed to choose whether they go by
>that route or not in knowledge of the costs required.

Might work, when/if there is a choice of route.  In many cases there is
not, and, worse, cannot be.

>By your argument, anyone who isn't an olympic swimmer is "imprisoned" in
>the UK by the evil airlines who insist on charging people fares to get
>out of Britain. Somehow, I don't think so.

No, there is a salient difference.  It is entirely possible to live a
full and satisfactory life 'stuck' within the confines of the UK
because you can't or don't want to pay the fare to get out.  The same
cannot be said for being stuck within the confines of your house and
garden -- unless, maybe, you own a Highland shooting estate you haven't
told us about.

>>Back to the original problem then.  If it was that simple, that's what
>>would happen.  It's not.
>
>No, but that's because the government has thus far said that only they
>will be allowed to build roads and motorways.

Umm?  Seems to me that there are an AWFUL lot of examples of places
where private people or developers have built private roads upon their
private land.  My mother-in-law lives on one such, in fact, in
Kirriemuir -- in a row of cottages built on a farmer's land and then
sold, where the council has refused to adopt the road.  There's another
very nice private coastal road running north from Weston super Mare,
which is used by a number of commuters.   Another little one handy for
getting around Bath.  One running between Studland and Poole (including
the ferry), down in Dorset.

What the Government has thus far said, far as I know, is that it will
not subsidise private road-builders to build roads, and that it will
not allow private roadbuilders a monopoly -- i.e. you could build a
road from Edinburgh to Carlisle, but the government will not guarantee
that it won't put up a public road serving the same points and will not
guarantee that no-one else will build a competing private road.  Oh,
and that it will not give private road developers the right to use
eminent domain purchase to acquire difficult parts of the route.  If
you can buy the land using only normal consuming power, you can
certainly put a road on it.  What the companies want is guaranteed
rights to have the *only* (private) road.

>>Sometimes, as in this case,
>>just as with many mathematical algorithms, it gets stuck at a local
>>maximum, and can't get far enough off it to find an even larger maximum
>>somewhere else in the range of solutions without a brute-force (there's
>>that word again) shove in the right direction.)  
>
>And where that kick from the local to the global maximum is, there's a
>profit in someone implementing the change. That's why it would get done.

Not necessarily, in a pure free-market model.  Back to the original
claim, again, the London-congestion problem.  If that is cleared up,
then there is a move to a higher maximum which would benefit
everybody.  However, any individual or small group which tried giving
the kick unilaterally would suffer a guaranteed loss.  Thus, there is
no incentive, unless everybody can be convinced to do it -- a
requirement for making the gain.  Now, there is no economic incentive
even for anyone to try to do the convincing.  Being on the lower false
maximum puts everyone at the same proportional disadvantage; moving to
the higher one does not improve any individual firms position relative
to other firms.  There is no economic push.

>>However, it's not clear that that is desireable in any case.  Maximising 
>>average good can be done by loading the extremes.  For example,
>>pre-Civil War in the Southern US, landowners perceived that they could
>>maximise the area's economic well-being by keeping all the money for
>>themselves, and using slave labour.  Judged purely on economic grounds,
>>that was the totally rational approach.  
>
>You must have missed the bit where I advocated that the economy serve
>the needs of individuals rather than the other way around. You've given
>the ultimate example of what happens when it's the other way around:
>slavery.

No, the market was indeed serving the needs of individuals.
Specifically, the needs of the individuals with the money; if you've
got no money, your needs don't count.  That is how the market works.
It was doing it rather well, in purely economic terms; only by stepping
outside the economic viewpoint could this be appreciated as wrong.

>Except that now, people are working and having some of their wages
>removed. That includes the doctor, so for some of the time, he's a
>slave, he has to work unpaid. And, since the money is extracted from all
>of us, we've all been made slaves to the extent that we're being charged
>involuntarily. 

Irrelevant, really.  I am not claiming that my system is morally better
than yours, I am simply claiming that yours is not morally better than
mine.  It doesn't surprise me that you can find ways in which the
(im)moralities match.  What I'd like to do is batter you into discussing
relative utility, rather than pretending it is a moral issue; the more
such parallels we can find between my system and yours, the better I'm
doing.

In any case, your doctor has the same sorts of 'freedom of choice' as
does my poor sod who lives on a road which has been privatised and made
a toll road.  (You said, you'll recall, that he has the choice of
paying the toll, or of staying in the house.)  Your doctor, on the
other hand, has an incredible range of choices by comparison.  He can
choose to work as a shop assistant -- less pay, less taxes.  He can
choose to work as a dustbin man -- even less taxes.  He can choose to
stop working entirely, and live rough -- no taxes at all.  He can also
choose to move somewhere else, where he can work as a doctor with a
lower tax rate.  No, I'm not being flippant; I think I'm being kinder
to your doctor than you are to my homeowner.

Let's go back a bit.  I said:

>>Long ago in the States (and I believe over here as well, but I'm weak
>>on that area of UK history) a great many roads were private toll roads,
>>owned by the folks who owned the land over which they passed.  It is
>>precisely because this system did not work well in the context of
>>changes in transportation needs due to the industrial revolution that
>>public roads took over.  I don't feel any compelling need to go back to
>>a system which has already been tried, and which has demonstrated its
>>unsuitability as a general solution.

You said (sorry, I've lost your original reply) something to the effect
that you wouldn't accept my assertion, and you believe that the public
roads took over due to pressure from the car companies.  Now, I'm still
sure I'm right, and all you'd need do is look it up.  (Or, for a small
fee, I'd consider a research consultancy.)  However, just to save
rehashing that, let's 'pretend' you're right.

What have you said, then?  Well, in essence, you've said that these car
companies, working in an essentially deregulated free-market
environment, to free-market rules, succeeded, by using available
methods, in maximising their benefit, and the benefit of their
customers.  That's just what you want, que no?  

'Maximising benefits' is a tricky business, because in a cut-throat
free-market (particularly one such as this, where required capital
outlays make it harder to set up competitors), the players with more
money have more say in determining what is 'maximal'.  There is no
reason to believe that what is 'maximal' for a large company and its
customers is 'maximal' for anyone outside that set.  Companies are not
out to maximise social utility, they are out to maximise their very own
utility.  In monopoly situations, there's not even any reason to believe
the the company's, and its customers', maxima coincide.

Now, in some contexts, where new business are easy to set up, so
ensuring competition, free-market mechanisms can work very nicely in
pulling the businesses' perceived maxima into line with 'society's
perceived maximum.  I would submit that road-building takes a lot of
start-up capital for a fairly slow return on investment, and as such it
will be a game for only a few large companies.  No real competition,
and so no real reason to believe that free-market pressures would work.
History would seem to indicate that, in fact, monopolies and cartels
would be more likely.

>As I've said, I'm more interested in freedom of choice. People should be
>free to associate and implement whatever scheme they want. As I've said,
>they can buy up whatever resources they like and give them away free for
>as long as they're able. It's just forcing others to join their scheme's
>that I disagree with.
>
>>However, note that in practice the statement 'whoever it is worth more
>>to will win' reduces to 'whoever has more money will win'. 
>
>Nope, and I'll give an example why not:
>
>Big Bad Company X wants to build a road and knows that there are
>customers willing to pay tolls so there'll be a nice profit.
>
>Farmer Giles owns a bit of spare pasture with some rare orchids growing
>there.  Lots of people like to come and see the orchids and it's
>otherwise useless land and they're no hassle so he leaves them be.
>
>Company X wants to build a road there though and is willing to buy that
>land. Farmer Giles is getting old and needs some security and so is
>willing to sell. But wait, the orchid people get together and start
>bidding against the company. They know they don't have nearly as much
>money but they up the bidding enough that the profit margin is
>threatened and the company thinks it will now be cheaper to take a route
>around the orchids by buying the land next door.

You are assuming some fairly rich orchid lovers (or else a hell of a lot
of them, highly organised) and a fairly poor company.  The reverse is at
least as likely.  Go look for newspaper stories about the new Tesco
being built (in the face of great opposition) on Golden Hill in Bristol.
Even as we speak.

>As for the idea of an individual stopping a route. This is perfectly
>possible. The folks that want that route bid up as high as they are
>willing and the individual refuses the offer. All that means is that for
>some reason (possibly including a pleasure in being perverse) it is
>worth more to that individual to block the route. 

Well, historically this has been done not so much to block a route for
aesthetic purposes, but rather to stop a route being built in
competition with an existing route, so as to preserve the monopoly
position of the person who owns the orignal route.  As such it is rarely
of benefit to anyone except that individual.

>So this scheme only requires the ability to appropriate funds without
>permission and possibly the ability to take people's land without their
>permission to work eh? It's amazing how efficient government can be!

>They're free to get together and implement it or someone could just do
>it and charge for usage. It doesn't have to be government. What you
>advocate is even more silly, you advocate that government build a road
>and charge *everyone* for it whether they use it or not.

OK, let's close out with a little thought experiment.  (Only sort you
can get funding for, these days.)  Consider town-building companies
A and B.

A and B each go out and buy a square mile or 3 of greenfield sites
(greenfield just to avoid arguments about things like prior rights of
way), and each builds a new town on its site -- self contained, houses,
shops, pubs, roads, parks, whatever you like in a new town.  So, now
we've got new town A and new town B.  No people yet, but no problem.

Both companies decide to sell/rent their houses/shops/etc with a tied
maintenance contract and behaviour covenants.  I.e. they will decide
what services to provide, they will provide them, and they will charge
an annual management fee for doing so, on top of your purchase price.
Further, they will determine local bye-laws as they deem them
necessary, subject to constraints about reasonableness and so on -- you
agree to obey such bye-laws as they are promulgated, or to move out.
Fair enough?  After all, it IS their new town, and all of this is made
clear in the purchase contract; if you don't like it, you don't have to
move there.

Then, at some later date, company B decides (under their power to set
bye-laws) that the needs of the community could be better reflected by
setting up a management committee elected from amongst the residents.
This management committee will handle the services, being paid a salary
to do so, and will collect the annual management fee.  Hey, presto,
I've invented local government.  How and when has the operation of town
B become improper?  Prima facie, it looks like it has even increased
freedom of choice -- after all, now it is representatives of the
residents setting policy, rather than the rather feudal company A in
the other town.  All of the inhabitants' contracts are still being
fulfilled, and they entered the agreement voluntarily.

No, I know, it's 100 years later, when the descendants of those people
are living there, because they didn't sign the contracts.  (If you
moved there from outside, you've got no complaint; you knew what the
situation was.  Only being born there gives you any case at all.)  OK,
that's a rational viewpoint, but a highly unprofitable one; unless you
are going to seriously suggest tearing the place down and starting from
scratch every time a new generation is born.  However, it's also
rational, I think, to say that these newbies have the power to change
the system, working from within it, if they can convince enough people
to get them onto the management committee.

Society evolved precisely because there are things which need to be
done which benefit everybody, which are more effectively done by people
working in unison, and for which everyone should pay since everyone
benefits.  You are asking to share in all the benefits, but only to pay
for those which you choose.  Public transport, for example, benefits
drivers as much as non-drivers.  I am claiming that belonging to
society gives you certain rights and benefits, and imposes certain
obligations upon you; and that society has the right to force you to
meet the obligations, in order to share in the benefits.  

(Side note, this does NOT justify the theory behind the poll tax, since
there are at least 3 different working definitions of 'equal payment',
and I know which I prefer.  If anyone wants to argue that, wait until
January.)

Even your much-praised free-market now relies upon society.  Go cut out
10000 pieces of paper the size of 50 pound notes, and see how much you
can buy with them.  Check out how the free market works in countries
which don't have a stable social base, or a solid infrastructure.

You claim that 'if people want something, they can form a group and
provide it'.  They have formed such groups, called communities, and
since such groups are generally too big for mass meetings, they have
elected 'subcommittees' (called 'governments') to handle the day to
day affairs.  It may be that you don't feel the government is properly
handling your interests any more.  Fine, but that doesn't invalidate
the concept, which is in fact precisely your own.  It might mean that
the present incumbents need out-cumbenting, or even that the details of
the mechanism need tuned.  

-- 
Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK
 P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!uknet!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132
Newsgroups: uk.misc