Public/Street Art in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

Of course, I did say before, we only pretend to be free-market-capitalist, in reality we contort the market all the time because we see how it fails.

It’s not that simple. We contort the market for many reasons, ranging from essential to utterly bogus. For example, parking minima in dense urban areas.

Umm...you're probably right in general, but I'd actually disagree with the parking minima example

Parking minima were added because of a market failure (drivers parking their vehicles all over the public right of way), it just happens to be the wrong way to solve the market failure. It more shows the limitation of central planning...choosing parking minima was a bad choice, the free market would never have done that, if we had solved the problem in another way (say by summarily crushing all illegally parked vehicles) the free market would have provided a more efficient solution to parking.

I'd say things like economic development funds are a "bogus" example. We invest in them because they help our city to do better, but ultimately it's a zero sum game, if we had invested in things which actually make our city better, it would have been just as effective--albeit harder to figure out. We are trying to put a finger on the market to slant it our way, but not because of a market failure, but because we'd rather win.

But we are getting really off topic here.