It's not the same thing at all, it's more like a bitter pill you have to swallow because ultimately some people just can't work - they're not lazy, they just can't keep up for whatever reason.
This is a problem exclusive to public roads, private toll roads are doing perfectly fine.
Taxes are going be collected one way or another. The goal should be used the taxes as efficiently as possible.
Couldn't have said this better myself.
As for taxing, wouldn't it tax everyone not just the laborers? Job guaranteed isn't stopping private companies from employing people. Why would that cause companies to suddenly not employ people, let alone layoffs because of it?
Who's going to provide them? In other words, where's the demand? You surely don't want the governments to do it and I'm sure companies are just going to do more automation as time goes on.
Seems to be a roundabout and more bureaucratic way to do basic income. Not to mention, unlike NIT, basic income doesn't, at least not directly, take money from you if you decide to work.
More bureaucratic? It eliminates all other forms of welfare or subsidy and relies on one form that you have to file either way - it's the most efficient way of doing a bad thing overall. As for demand, there's plenty of it, we just need to get rid of many regulations and the minimum wage. No shortage of factory jobs in China, what are they doing that we aren't?
They're also not built to handle the kind of traffic that public roads see, and they're only available in small stretches across the country. It's also a ridiculous concept because businesses already make money via transportation on public roadways, and the entire free market would come to a halt if just a few major interstate highways collapsed. Additionally, we already pay taxes for this purpose, private toll roads are just charging you a second time.
I can assure you that roads came before the government, but that's a nuanced conversation that's irrelevant to the subject at hand. "Large corporations" are the ones that pay the most for roads because they have fleets of gigantic trucks to transport their goods which are exceedingly highly taxed, plus they go through fuel like no tomorrow. Roads are financed by intra and interstate commerce, not by you - your tax contribution is inconcievably small in comparison.
I mean, how is negative income tax anymore efficient than just giving people a basic income that's not based on anything?
Lower wages allow private enterprise to reduce outsourcing and off-shoring as well as increase hiring new employees and the creation of new facilities, this in turn increases demand for workers, and that higher demand stimulates wages. Rising wages artificially deflates the economy. Instead, you can run a healthy economy and supplement the few wages that need to be supplemented. That way you're not hitting the private enterprise and maintain growth.
That's kind of debatable, considering public highways date back to at least ancient Rome
Regardless, we're all paying into it and we're not seeing any results from that. If the free market was so great, it would take care of our infrastructure for us instead of relying on the government to hand out contracts before anything gets done.
And before anyone has the chance to use the Domino's example again, I'm going to butt in and point out that it's far from a perfect solution, considering a) they're not doing it everywhere, it's a PR stunt that will only select a handful of submitted locations, as per the fine print, and b) they're using money that they wouldn't have had had they been paying corporate taxes, which arguably could have been used to repave more roads due to larger contract opportunities than what they're doing effectively for publicity
Exactly. Potholes are not nearly as big a concern as collapsing bridges or washed out roadways, either.
Because the free market relies on consensual transactions. Infrastructure is under the jurisdiction of the government, so unless the government hires a contractor to (re)build infrastructure, the contractor can't build anything because there's no contract and no profit. What you're telling me is that you're paying road tax and the roads still suck, which is further evidence that the government sucks at everything.
It's literally a joke example, the real example provided is a toll road. More often than not they're infinitely better than public roads because they're designed to be self-sustainable. Public roads are not, public roads are designed to get you from point A to point B, and as long as they are fit for that purpose, the government is perfectly happy.
Are you in earnest telling me that people have never traveled before a government told them they could? Because that's turbo-silly.
It's more efficient in every single way possible, from administrative costs to the so-called "perverse incentives" problem the current welfare system has.
This is a non-partisan issue - the government sucks at everything under any administration and thus, logically, we should minimise the size and scope of it down to the functions that are absolutely necessary for the operation of the country, such as national defense, the police force and so on and so forth. It's the degree to which we need to cut down/expand that's the issue between the two sides.
If the government was small and had relatively little control over the private lives of citizens, the issue of a federal election would be almost non-existent as people would be more concerned with states' rights. You can feasibly move from a liberal state to a conservative state or vice versa, you can't feasibly move out of the United States and into another country without basically restarting your entire life and incurring massive costs. You have freedom of travel between states, you have no such freedom abroad - you're either accepted or you're not which introduces an externality - the government of the other country.
Exactly, which is another reason why it should be small. A small f*ck-up can be rectified, a big f*ck-up is unsolvable without further growth. Just look at social security - it's going to be (predictably) insolvent in the foreseeable future.
That's not what I meant, and definitely not what I think you were meaning either. I'm talking specifically of paved roads that are maintained over any measurable period of time, rather than just paths that people followed due to migration. You said it's offtopic, I agree, but I what I was trying to do was demonstrate that paved trade routes that are built and maintained using tax money date back quite literally millennia. The problem we're having right now is that our government seems to just... Not care, I guess? about maintaining out infrastructure. Which doesn't (necessarily) indicate a failure of government, it just indicates a failure of elected officials
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Psionic Roshambo:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c_jlLQb2_rM&pp=ygUQSGVyIG5hbWUgaXMgc29ueQ%3D%3D
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