George Will wrote an excellent column yesterday about better public policy through private solutions, not taxes. Mr. Will trained his intellect on traffic congestion in populous areas.
Innovative new approaches that integrate private investments, such as toll lanes or privately-operated highways, are much better than simply raising the federal gas tax to solve transportation problems, Mr. Will says.
“When taxpayers pay the gas tax, they do not know what they are buying — except “Bridges to Nowhere” and other pork. When drivers pay a toll, they know exactly what they are getting — life’s most precious scarce thing, time.
[T]here are large sources of private capital available for investments in transportation infrastructure. Indiana has leased its toll road to a private consortium that will have an incentive — profit — to use electronic toll collection rather than human collectors who slow traffic and sometimes cost twice as much as the tolls they collect.
New electronic technologies, harnessed to private capital and the profit motive, can nimbly use price incentives to produce new traffic patterns and driving habits, thereby increasing Americans’ freedom to pursue happiness, speedily.”¯
Relying on “¯new technologies harnessed to private capital and the profit motive” to solve our problems? We’ve got too many policy-makers - and yes, too many Republican members of Congress - who use old fashioned command & control schemes and high taxes to fix real-world problems.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Alternative Energy Technology, Politics/Government . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 12th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
The real question is, “in the real world, is cap and trade any better, or even, any different than command and control.” There are real problems with cap and trade. The first is the cap. Caps are always set by politicians–the same guys that have forced certain technologies in the past. The second problem is that trading. There’s nothing wrong with trading, the problem is defining who has the rights. The EU’s carbon trading program hasn’t worked well, in part because everyone keeping increasing their 1990 baselines. Now Russia is claiming it was emitting a lot more carbon in 1990, just so they can sell the credits. Corruption is no way to run a market. Is this better than command and control?