blog roll
|
mlk day...,
2005-01-17 13:38:24
| Main |
self-filled prescription...,
2005-01-19 11:21:04
Ken points out that Kevin Carson finally started a blog, giving me something to sister to The Triumph of Conservatism as I pick my way through it on the train. Curiously he doesn't like trains, in agenda form:
end to transportation subsidies, which would force big business to internalize all its own long-distance shipping costs and result in a world where everybody (in the West and the TW both) buys stuff made close to home.
From which I'm not clear on his interest in alternatives for mass transport for people who need to go somewhere far away and shipping goods that only come from somewhere far away than publically subsidized private enterprise.
The fact that a large, centralized infrastructure system can only come about when the state subsidizes or organizes it from above, or that such state action causes it to exist on a larger scale than it otherwise would, indicates that the transaction costs are so high that the benefits are not worth it to people spending their own money. There is no demand for it by consumers willingly spending their own money, at the actual costs of providing the services, risks and all, without state intervention.
If I read that right he doesn't think enough people would be interested in highway construction or airports to make them happen on a voluntary basis. I would imagine enough people would disagree to prove him wrong, but what do I know. In revolutionary Spain the trains ran on time, rather than being abolished, and that's about it.
If you're not familiar you might want to do some brief reading on the scale and variety of the transport subsidies you help pay for, floating whatever profit margins, poor practices, corporate extravegances, and asorted other inefficiences and injustices such as they exist.
:: posted by buermann @ 2005-01-18 14:35:07 CST |
link
|
|
|
|