RE: Should public transportation be free?
May 30, 2022 at 12:10 pm
(This post was last modified: May 30, 2022 at 12:41 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(May 30, 2022 at 11:49 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Just as people mention with respect to…say….communism, we might want to actually try free market capitalism before we declare with any certainty what it inexorably leads to.
It’s not free market capitalism that lead to the current situation with respect to fossil fuels, public transportation…or…the price of insulin. As examples. I don’t personally think that the free market can solve our current problems- but that might have something to do with tying bags of sand to our ankles for generations. Public transportation (if any kind) in the us is likely to be wildly inefficient simply because we designed our cities with the assumption of universal private automobile ownership- another example. Think of the headaches involved in Europe with respect to widening roads designed for horses and buggy.
The flaw in free market capitalism is every market participant is incentivized above all else to scheme to make the market less free in his own favor. Your chances of getting ahead any other way is slim and temporary, yet free market capitalism is suppose to work by unleashing the desire to get ahead.
Free market capitalism is like a person who imagines he would live the longest and happiest if he is surrounded by psychopaths who all desires above all else to personally kill him, because each of their individual desires to kill him will exactly counterbalance everyone else’s as none of them wants to let another have the privilege of killing him first.
Perhaps the person believes he could invite a fast shooting sherif to police the psychopaths while leaving the beneficial aspects of their psychopathy intact. But whether that will work depends on the psychopaths not also killing the sheriff, or the manage to have one of their own elected sheriff, or the sheriff seeing value in joining the psychopaths.
You can’t “actually” try something if the process of getting there necessarily create ever stronger countervailing effects the closer you get to the ideal.
