General Road and Highway Discussion

[SammyOES2]

I agree that other tax revenue should go down, ceteris paribus; on the other hand, the government itself does not need or want tax revenue. ... I will agree that many governments have a bias towards new program spending rather than tax reductions and I think I would agree with you that the default use of any “windfall” should be tax reduction or debt payment.

Yeah, I'm not making any judgements of greed or anything like that.  Just saying that if we're no longer paying for a service through general revenue, that money should be returned to taxpayers (logically, maybe not actually in practice) and then as a separate matter deciding if additional services are actually worth offering.  Mostly my point is just one that we should decide on the services a Government offers (+ debt reduction) and then fund those, versus figuring out how much money the Government is collecting and then spending that money on services.

Let’s take an example: I benefit from the highways because my bread arrives on a truck that takes the highway.

OK, but I pay for the bread, and what I pay has to cover all the expenses associated with making and delivering the bread. This includes the highway used to deliver it. If the highway really provides a big enough benefit to actually be worthwhile, that should be reflected in the affordability of bread, even if the delivery truck has to pay for the road the same as they pay for every other input into the bread-providing process. Nobody says that I benefit from the ovens used to cook the bread, and therefore the general public should pay for big ovens.

The same observation applies to every other use of the roads: if something truly beneficial depends on the road, it can afford to pay for the road. If it can’t afford to pay for the road, that suggests that it is a marginal activity that possibly isn’t actually demanded sufficiently to need to exist.

The biggest objection I see to the above is essentially related to economic inequality: economically speaking, the merest whim of a billionaire (say, $100,000 worth of stuff) is worth more than an entire year of a poor person’s life (way less than $100,000 spent on all purchases, including life-necessities such as food). But even here, instead of saying that poor people should be able to use roads for free, it makes more sense to say that they should get some money for free, and they can decide whether to spend it on roads or on something else.

Essentially, the bottom line is that by providing free roads, we as a society are deciding for everybody that they will spend their money on roads. I believe in giving everybody individual choice to the greatest extent feasible, and that definitely includes deciding how much to spend on expressways.

You're missing a couple of things though:

1. There is very large and intangible social value to the movement of people.  Not to get too political but lots of problems in the world are caused by people being in their own bubble and not actually being exposed to different people / experiences / etc.

2. There are Government services that rely on the highway network.  Ambulances.  Fire.  Police.  Public Transportation.  Etc.  I guess we could toll those, but it seems silly.  And it still wouldn't really cover the benefit.  The mere existence of a highway network can save us from building additional hospitals, improve health outcomes, etc.  These are benefits that aren't particularly correlated with the amount of miles driven.  Instead they exist as soon as the infrastructure exists.

3. Related to 2, there are really large network effects related to highway infrastructure.  It enables a whole lot of economic activity that otherwise wouldn't be possible or profitable.  Everyone benefits from that.  Which is very different than a bakery going in (it still has economic spin-off benefit, but not on the same scale as something like transportation).

4. I don't have a 4.    But those are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are a lot more.

This is a bit like saying that everybody should have enough food to live, but if you want caviar, you’ll be paying for it, and it’s expected that some people won’t be able to afford caviar.

I disagree that this is the same thing.  The caloric value of food is the same (roughly) for each person.  So its generally easy to make a distinction like this.

It's not true for roads.  A 4-lane highway from two northern Ontario towns is very different transportation service level than a 4-land highway between KW and Toronto.  It's silly (to me) to use the physical size of the road and ignore the actual context of the road.