2 comments:
Friday, July 3, 2009
Free parking revisited
A while ago I posted about the trouble with free parking, which led to some substantive comments worth promoting to a post. Here they are:
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You know, these free market principles make a lot more sense if you assume everyone has the same amount of money, and hence the dollars they allocate to something represent exactly their 'desire' for that object. So the person who wants it the most gets it, with the least fuss.
Fine, you can say that the people with more money have more entitlement to stuff, that is the idea of capitalism anyway. But when it comes to basic needs, yes, like parking, it's meant to be something everyone can get. So free market can totally screw it. The richest people get it, even if they don't want it that much (a bit of a stretch), and maybe even abuse it.
It's more of an obvious problem with, for example, gas. If there's a limited amount of it, and prices soar, then rich folks can use it to excess, and poor people can get seriously screwed. So price caps as a form of socialism seem necessary, even though it makes the distribution much less efficient.
I don't think what you're saying makes a whole lot of sense. You seem to have slipped into the mindset that goods and services are just magically already there in set amounts, and that what happens on the consuming end has no effect on what happens on the producing end.
But consumption drives production. If gas becomes very scarce, it is in everyone's interest for prices to reflect this (for them to "soar"), not because the rich are "entitled" to anything, but because high profit margins in the gas business will encourage people, in the aggregate, to divert more resources into producing more gas, and so there will be more gas for everyone, and prices will go back down--for everyone. Or, alternatively, if the gas supply cannot be increased any further (if we have reached "peak gas"), then the high cost of driving a gas-powered automobile will start to make non-gas-reliant modes of transportation more competitive, and people will find it profitable to start diverting resources into developing those new industries and technologies.
So I think in this case you are guilty of "shooting the messenger"--you're blaming the price for the problem, when really the price is just indicating the real problem, which is that the tradeoffs of producing this good--gas--are becoming too costly in comparison to other things we could be spending our time and energy on. By introducing price controls you're just "living in denial"--delaying progress by keeping everyone in the same spending pattern on the same products, even as the quality and access to those products steadily declines.
Of course, this free market pricing mechanism can't be applied to everything--sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. For example, with healthcare, we might decide that it's morally unacceptable to deny a poor person medical coverage in an emergency, and then find ourselves on a slippery slope, so that by the time we're giving away ER care for free, it actually is more efficient to give that person access to less costly preventive care that would prevent the costly trip to the ER in the first place. And so--boom--you're on your way to some form of socialized medicine. That's just fine.
But there are no such slippery-slope-inducing moral imperatives regarding parking spaces! Only a child of Los Angeles could believe something so patently absurd as the idea that "free parking" is a "basic need". It reminds me of the Woody Allen quote about LA: "I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light".