promethea.incorporated

brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?

freelancejake:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

Me: Is there anything you believe the US government does well?

@theunitofcaring: *looks at the roof and contemplates for about half a minute*

Me: …The longer the pause, the more libertarian the person.

How does it count if one can immediately think of a list but it’s really really short? Like, if someone asked me about Finland I’d be like:

  1. Giving each new baby a cardboard box full of stuff. Stuff is taken out of the box and given to the baby, the box is filled with sleeping baby.
  2. Holding cops responsible for their firearm use. They may be absolute barbarians with their batons and “projectile launchers” (have I mentioned finnish cops use weapons that are too dangerous for US cops?) but they don’t shoot people with gun-guns.
  3. Being really really soft on crime.
  4. Giving all children free school lunches.
  5. (crickets chirping)

I like roads.

I don’t. Roads are an unearned subsidy to car users, who then proceed to pass the costs on to everyone else, such as a promethea who spends every spring choking from the dust traffic causes around here, without being compensated for it adequately by those who benefit from roads.

Furthermore, the non-toll non-internalizing-externalities nature of most roads means that public transport can’t compete fairly on the market and needs to be similarly subsidized, only in a more obvious way, which means that public transport is usually comparably underfunded.

Also, the oversupply of roads along with bad city planning policies damages the fabric of society by making it artificially favorable to live in otherwise unaccessible places.

I’m not saying that privatizing all the roads would be the perfect solution because the system as it is would basically just be a windfall to rentseekers, but making the users of the roads pay for the harms, instead of the people living near them, would be a damn fine start. The existing road infrastructure could perhaps be treated as a natural resource like aquifers and used to extract monopoly rents from users, which are then shared to all the people living in the area. Or something. But subsidizing drivers is definitely a really bad approach, so naturally that’s the one the government does.

2 months ago · 180 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink

  1. almostcoralchaos reblogged this from chroniclesofrettek
  2. raginrayguns reblogged this from thegreatjackal
  3. fantasticmojo47 reblogged this from rareandradiant-maiden
  4. nathanielbuildsatesseract reblogged this from thegreatjackal
  5. baby-darkling reblogged this from rareandradiant-maiden
  6. socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from shlevy and added:
    TBH I’d rather have excessive than insufficient vaccination programs. If unnecessary polio vaccines even when it’s...
  7. aurorasanders reblogged this from rareandradiant-maiden
  8. rareandradiant-maiden reblogged this from sinesalvatorem
  9. chroniclesofrettek reblogged this from shlevy and added:
    That seems totally reasonable to me. Eradication of diseases like polio is a really really big deal and not the sort of...
  10. missarizonatea reblogged this from sinesalvatorem
  11. voximperatoris reblogged this from whereismyphoenix and added:
    My car doesn’t work, but it doesn’t explode when I drive it. ;)
  12. whereismyphoenix reblogged this from sinesalvatorem and added:
    Not become a dictatorship/monarchy/single-party state?
  13. dontgetdead reblogged this from rocketverliden
  14. sinesalvatorem posted this