On Wed, July 9, 2014 6:30 pm, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
On 2/07/2014 12:00 PM, Michael Scott wrote:
If there were tolls on the road you have the choice of using it or not and paying or not. Without tolls and with taxes funding roads you have no choice. It comes out of general revenue. I don't know that tolls on roads is the problem.
Paying taxes for public infrastructure is quite different to paying tolls for private owners to extort monies year on year.
This raises an interesting point; usually such infrastructure is considered a public good, which ideally means individuals can't be excluded from it, and individual use doesn't prevent use by others. Now of course even a road isn't perfectly aligned to such criteria. The presence of tolls does create a means of exclusion (i.e., it excludes those who can't or won't pay), and a road is not entirely non-rivalrous, as gridlock illustrates. What a tollway system does it's shifted a slightly progressive fee system (through taxes) to a flat-rate tax system which, of course, effects the low incomes more onerously. It also provides for monopolistic income generated to go to a private company which, to use the language of classical political economy, acts as both landlord (rent-seeking) and capitalist (profit-seeking). A user of the services rents both the economic land (i.e., location) that the tollway is based on, as well as paying an interest fee for the infrastructure itself. Very smart business sense, but possibly not so great for the economy in aggregate, or for those who are paying. -- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GradCertTerAdEd (Murdoch), GradCertPM, MBA (Tech Mngmnt) (Chifley) mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt